Design Studio Website
Monday, August 30, 2004
Avoid These Mistakes in Launching an Innovation Initiative
Recently Innovation Resource had occasion to return to a large financial service company that operates in multiple countries and has multiple divisions. They had assisted the company in launching an innovation initiative in 2000, and their efforts to derive revenue growth via innovation continue after several years of turbulence in their market environment as well as numerous changes in leadership. During a recent assignment, they informally surveyed a group of 20 managers who were heavily involved in the implementation of that ambitious even groundbreaking innovation initiative.

Here's what they agreed were the key learnings:

You must keep metrics simple. The metrics apparently became burdensome in many cases. Additional metrics for innovation should be easy to capture, easy to track, and should not cause behavior that is engaged in only to "look good" with reported results. It's a "big mistake" to have more than 4 or 5 innovation metrics.
You need to invest in innovation. Product manufacturers often have metric of "percentage of sales spent on R&D." This service business, like so many others, has no budget or earmarked resources for innovation. How can we do innovation without budget?
You must continue to work on the culture. The innovation culture suffered greatly with staff cutbacks and general uncertainty in the air.
You must show people examples of regular contributors and managers coming up with value-adding, customer pleasing innovations. If you do, you'll get more of that behavior.
You must find and build new champions -- people who are responsible for making innovation happen, enhancing enablers of innovation and busting barriers. Senior management emphasis is critical. When it wanes, innovation emphasis dies. When it's present, you are bound to see big and little results in terms of top-line revenue growth, strategy innovations, new products, and process improvements.

(This from Tucker on Innovation from http://www.innovationresource.com)
posted by Naina @ Permalink 8/30/2004 11:06:00 AM   0 comments  --- Google It! ---
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
blog navigation
recent entries
monthly archive
innovation links
changethis manifestos
design links
other links
   
RSS and XML Feed Subscribe to Innovation with Bloglines
Listed on BlogShares I'm on orkut
My profile on LinkedIn My profile on Ecademy
Skype Me! Blogger Profile
Innovation Challenge Judge Blogstreet Profile
directions for using the blog
all links are in green: when you take your mouse-pointer over a link, it turns blue with a dashed gray underline. links in the post-body are also dash-underlined.

all links to useful information within the blog are under the *blog navigation* sidebar on the top-right.

the topmost right-corner advertises the yellow pages service provided by my parent organization, InnovationNetwork.

the ASIDE Innovation Blog does not advertise for third-parties and there are no pop-ups associated with the blog.

for any complaints kindly e-mail me at asideblog [at] gmail [dot] com.

Naina Redhu has no liability for the contents on the pages of the weblinks under the *innovation*, *design* and *other* categories.

the *ideas@aside* logo is the sole-property of ASIDE and Naina Redhu and is copyrighted under the Creative Commons like the rest of the graphics and writing existing on the ASIDE Innovation Blog.

the blog has been optimized for Internet Explorer and uses websafe colors. the color scheme has been extensively researched for eye-safety for on-screen viewing as well as for the impact of colors on the brain. the colors on this weblog are suitable for a stress-free read and will relax all five senses.

comments relating to subject-matter under innovation / creativity and design / colors are welcome.
All comments, ideas and thoughts on the ASIDE Innovation Blog
are property of their authors unless otherwise stated
Copyright Naina Redhu, 2004
ASIDE is powered by Blogger