In today's competitive environment, where businesses
face more extreme pressures and are challenged to be more efficient
than ever, companies must excel at innovation to succeed and grow,
writes
Chris Moyer, chief technologist for EDS in EMEA.
Enterprises today face an explosion of digital content, ageing
infrastructures and constrained resources. Harnessing the
creativity of internal teams, suppliers and industry experts can
help businesses to find solutions to address some of these
pressures. However, to deliver practical value, innovation must be
a fundamental part of a company's core objectives.
I recently attended the EDS Practical
Innovation Summit, where we discussed tips for businesses who want
to make innovation easier to effect within their organisations.
From this, I've distilled five steps to help any organisation
develop an Innovation Ideal.
Firstly, identify what you want innovation to do for you.
Innovation varies between organisations. Many organisations are
looking for that increased level of intimacy or transparency
between themselves and their customers others want new products or
services.
The key is to have a prioritised view of your requirements. The
diagram below demonstrates some of the continuous pressures that
our clients encounter and the impact of these on innovation.
External factors might also be driving their business strategy, and
these also feed in to pressures that clients need solutions to, eg
being more environmentally friendly.
The next step is to understand what you know - and what you need
to find elsewhere. Investigate what capabilities you have in-house
to encourage innovation.
Many companies have specialists in different subject matters
that can help with incremental innovation and some even have
R&D departments that look for step-change innovation that
radically changes a product or service.
Others have collaborated with a network of organisations such as
universities to get more ideas and co-ordinated research.
EDS has long encouraged collaboration. Today, with our
Agility
Alliance partners, we invest the combined weight of an
estimated $20bn in annual research and development.
Once you've understood what you know, you can start to encourage
ideas. Most organisations claim to have great communications
between groups and through layers of leadership. While this is true
for some, others still need mechanisms to allow people to share
their ideas with others for synthesis, analysis, evaluation, and
hopefully investment.
Different ideas
At EDS, we use several mechanisms to gather and prioritise
different ideas from across our organisation, such as the EDS
Innovative Ideas Programme (EIIP), which is web-based, allowing
organisations to capture, prioritise and communicate ideas across
their teams, reaching across organisational boundaries and allowing
anyone to suggest better ways of working.
More than 1,000 ideas were submitted through the EDS Idea
Campaigns programme in 2007 and 60 EDS clients have installed
versions of EIIP to get the same benefits within their
organisation.
However, ideas and invention are great, but it is only through
implementing these that ideas transform into innovation. Different
mechanisms can be used to prioritise ideas and ensure roll-out.
A specific agenda focused on innovation is one mechanism in
place for EDS accounts in EMEA. Another is linking different
skills, successful innovation agendas and subject matter experts
through our Innovation JumpStart Programme while encouraging
innovators through active patent programmes is one more.
Implementation
The last step - that of implementation - is always the hardest
part of the change process. Changes require active sponsors,
careful management, excellent communication and agility to adapt to
the different situations that will come up as you attempt to make
innovation a continuous activity at your organisation.
One mechanism that EDS uses is a
Global Innovation Network
(GIN) that serves as one central repository for activities,
subject matter expertise, industry views and solutions that worked
elsewhere. In 2007, there were 629 clients listed and referenced on
the GIN with 151 formal innovation agendas in place and 232
targeted initiatives tracked. All of our employees can access this
information, and use it across industries to help other
clients.