Overview: Innovation Strategy
While innovation can’t be turned on like a tap, it is something you can make more likely to happen.
Creating a favourable environment for innovation starts with getting the basics right:
- integrating your internal and external communications strategies,
- combining them with knowledge management tools and processes,
- and integrating training and employee engagement programmes.
In other words, what I mean by digital transformation.
Integrating these strategies, processes and tools provides a strong foundation onto which you can build dedicated innovation processes.
However, building and integrating them is itself a major innovation challenge!
Sidestep this chicken-and-egg problem by framing each strategy and programme as key components of the final, integrated goal: to build an Internal Innovation Community, which:
- supports knowledge management, information flows, (in)formal training, ideation, employee engagement and more
- helps your external communications team discover useful internal content, and transfer it outwards
- ensures useful external information reaches the right people inside
- spreads an innovation & communications culture throughout the organisation.
But don’t try and build it all at once. Instead, build and roll out one part of the Programme, and then use it to build and roll out the next.
Like to figure out how? Get in touch.
More services: start with Communication strategy.
Relevant resources
marketoonist.com
Good short history: "design thinking ... has spread from products to services to just about anything in business... often used as shorthand for a magic potion approach to innovation and creative problem solving... end up being a theatrical thing that people can point to and say, ‘oh we did that.’ "So it's one example of how "or…
blog.dropbox.com
a unique productivity philosophy called deep work. He carefully blocked out his day, and created space for long, uninterrupted hours to write ... tactics like travelling on foot to give himself more time in isolation and actively sought out isolated spaces to work... his latest book, Digital Minimalism... there's an implicit reward for the sha…
medium.com
... they have recently embarked on a journey to become “Agile.”... neither explicit support nor discouragement from senior executives... they are failing for the same list of reasons as every other team I have met with in the last 5 years. Here are those reasons:... 1. There is no clear vision for the product....The “idea” has been handed down …
qz.com
“agile” describes so many different work systems that it’s become an almost meaningless term... for IBM “the leaders have to be with the squads [his word for small teams] and the squads have to be in a location.”... Research suggests remote workers are more productive and log more hours than employees who work in the office, and for many companie…
hbr.org
GE's FastWorks is "a framework for entrepreneurs, building on “The Lean Startup” ... an approach to developing new products that came out of “Agile” software development... It’s now being tried in manufacturing since GE and others believe that rapid learning cycles with customers will reduce the risk that you build something you can’t sell." Star…