Innovation is right in front of you… Can you see it?

You’ve been issued the mandate, “find new innovative ideas, improve your productivity by __% and bottom line savings of $___ in the next 90 days”.

 

How do you find business innovation?

Sometimes innovative ideas and execution greatness can be right in front you and you don’t even recognize it.  A few years ago, The Washington Post published an article about a world renowned violinist, Joshua Bell, who routinely plays to sold out symphony halls at $100+ per seat, and who engaged in a profound experiment.  One Friday morning, he arrived at a busy Washington DC Metro station, dressed casually and sporting a baseball cap, took out his priceless Stradivari violin, and began to play Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Chaconne” from Partitia No. 2, a composition widely considered one of the greatest and more challenging musical pieces ever written, and continued with other great works.  He played for 43 minutes.  What happened?

He was virtually ignored by over 1,000 people without acknowledgement.  Most passed by without even a look.  (You can view a 2 minute summary on this video.)

 

Are there innovative ideas or process improvements right in front of you, and you simply don’t see them?

We recently worked with a client who was confronted with finding ways to improve their delivery process.  Their management quickly pointed out that they had been burned for the past decade with consultants and vendors who had recommended new technologies that would solve their problems, but ultimately ended in failed, large project expenditures.  After conducting an assessment, observing work patterns, and asking a lot of tough questions, we came up with many recommendations and a roadmap to success, some involving new, powerful technologies.  But, the business case supported roadmap was essential.  In fact, the first process to be improved required no technology at all.  We had observed the client’s delivery process and found that by reconfiguring their workspace to optimize inventory storage & access, improved product configuration, and authorization processes, that inventory levels could be greatly reduced, and several labor minutes could be shaved off every transaction.  Those reduced inventories and labor minutes resulted in $3 million of annual bottom line savings, with higher levels of effectiveness, employee satisfaction and productivity.  It has paved the way for higher levels of performance gains through other improved processes and technologies.

Was this innovation?  Absolutely.

They had performed this old process activity for years.  The change was right in front of them all the time.   This success has paved the way for higher levels of performance gains through other improved process and technology proposals.

How do you find innovation?

This question would require hours of conversation, and perhaps a book to be written, but a few pearls of wisdom and experiences are proffered:

Change your Perspective.

It’s easy to make assumptions, and fall into the habit of seeing things the way they’ve always been viewed.  But in this exercise, put yourself in your target audience shoes.  If you want to improve sales or marketing, become the customer.  If you are optimizing product delivery, look at things from user’s perspective.  Would you buy from … you?

Talk to your Customers and Employees

Ask powerful and tough questions to find innovation.  Use a lot of “why”, “how”, and “what if” questions that spark real discourse and exploration.  With employees, you are not seeking to find out what employees do in their job, you want to know where the problems or innovations are.  Ask your employees, “what was the toughest case you’ve worked on?”, or “how did you handle your most difficult customer?”, and “why do you have to ….?”.  On those “why” questions, make sure you drill down on the initial answer, as innovation comes from this type of mining.

Open Your Mind to New Ideas

This business world is under rapid transformation and disruption.  If you have been ‘hunkering down’ for the past few years, you might be amazed at the speed of change and agility of your competitors or other industries that may have innovative ideas for you.  Consider attending a trade show of an unrelated business to observe how those companies are creating products or services for other markets.  Conduct offsite creative sessions with the purpose of exploring fresh ideas or learnings from your teams or customers.  Join some social media platforms to experience new networking and contact media, and engage in various forums where new ideas and critique are offered freely.  And,  consider opening a company specific social media page where customer can offer suggestions, requests, praise, or criticism – a potential goldmine in terms of innovation and loyalty optics.

Get Empirical Data,… Never Stop Measuring

You cannot innovate, nor improve, if you do not have a performance baseline and you do not continuously measure.  The only way you can ascertain a benefit, determine a solid ROI projection, and most importantly, prove any benefits are ultimately attained is through establishing a baseline of performance, building a solid business case to support the change, and continuously measuring and reporting on the progress.

Acknowledge, Encourage, and Reward

As you uncover great performance or innovative ideas, acknowledge those contributors.   Simply promoting their positive activity to your company will have exponential positive productivity effect on those being celebrated, and greatly influence others.

Use BPM Disciplines for Greater Discovery and Communication

Again, more time is required to cover this pearl, but BPM (Business Process Management) offers many powerful techniques to discover process innovation and improvement opportunities.  Beyond discovery, you’ll need to be able to share your vision and plan with a broad set of interested or affected stakeholders; and BPM (and BPM tools) provides the frameworks and language to articulate the opportunity in terms of process, workforce, role, material, governance, and monetary impact.

Certainly these are not an exhaustive list, but hopefully you find some of these ideas worthy of pursuit in your quest for effective innovation.

Like Joshua Bell, the violin virtuoso who played in the DC Metro station, sometimes innovative ideas and execution greatness can be right in front you and you don’t even recognize it.

In the movie, Contact, Jodie Foster’s character, Ellie Arroway, is challenged with deciphering a message sent from Vegan extraterrestrials (…think customers), and is given a hint from her mentor S.R. Hadden.

HADDEN

“Pages and pages of data. Over 63 thousand in all, and on the parameter of each…”

ELLIE

“…alignment symbols, a registration marks, but they don’t line up.”

HADDEN

“Ahh, but they do. If you think like a Vegan. An alien intelligence is going to be more advanced. That means efficiency functioning on multiple levels and in multiple dimensions.

The video reflects this by combining three pages in 3 dimensions… they match up.”

ELLIE

“Yes! Of course. Where’s the primer?”

HADDEN

“You’ll see. Every three dimensional page contains a piece of the primer, there it was all the time, staring you in the face.”

 

There it was all the time, staring you in the face.

….

If you’d like assistance finding innovation, and measurable process improvement in your business, please contact Bizappia, or email us at info@bizappia (dot) com.

 

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