For the astute observer of innovation processes, the next evolution of the practice is becoming ever clearer. Stakeholders of every type have demonstrated a remarkable eagerness, resourcefulness and ingenuity for contributing to the improvement of things they care about; which increasingly can mean to include matters related to your organization and its future. In fact, many of these break-out stakeholders are no longer just hoping for a seat at the table – they are expecting it. And not just as participants invited in to listen-in on “the conversation” – but as integral and engaged agents that co-create and execute - making things happen.

In these especially trying market conditions, one would have to be indifferent to ignore the value of this good opportunity or pretend that this trend isn’t really catching fire. It’s here and now.

The culture of collaboration has been growing in every facet of human endeavor. As such, the time for leaders to not just recognize this fact but seize the moment is at hand. The days of dictating what your stakeholders think and feel about you are history - you can't force or coerce people to like you - the advent of new media and the legacy of experience won't tolerate it anymore. That paradigm has most definitely shifted, so that the people important to your organization have to now genuinely like you, share an affinity and feel listened to; whether they are suppliers, shareholders, employees or customers

This new brand of collaborators are more than mere “change agents” – these are “stakeholder activists” and I don’t mean this to say trouble-makers. Rather they are people of action who can amplify, extend, augment and accelerate your course in a new and valuable direction. Whether internal or external, markets speak with actions and the activists provide plenty of it – why then not harness this good vibe to useful ends? To try and prolong a broken model and dictate from a traditional command & control position is just not a tenable model anymore. Not given the scale, speed and global interaction that drives business today. Our organizations are interwoven with the totality of other organizations and the human dynamics driving all their associated activity. Trying to isolate your organization from this increasingly attractive and positive pole is anachronistic at best – lame at worst.

In today's heightened state of panic, the hustle-and-bustle excitement of running the business has in many quarters been supplanted by doom-and-gloom worry of uncertainty – in certain instances the culture of fear is almost palpable. People and companies are running scared, with a sense of helplessness driving their fear ever higher.

Part of the problem is that through meteoric growth and cheap capital, some of today’s managers don’t really have a lot of hands-on managerial experience; a deficiency that becomes highly amplified when it comes to managing people. Gone are the days where you could spend a problem away or buy an entree into a new market by simply acquiring your way into it – today’s valuations are lop-sided and easy-money has all but dried-up. The era we live in is one where organic growth is king and many managers who are in leadership positions may be out of practice; or worse, don’t have a clue of how to do it.

In the past decade, businesses have gone through trends that have transformed the relationship between:

• Employees and employers
• Companies and customers
• Markets and geographies
• Everyone and everything…thanks to the internet

Along with these fundamental changes, companies have also endured:

• Ever-shorter boom and bust cycles in the public markets
• Credit squeezes
• Right-sizing
• Down-sizing
• Out-sourcing
• Off-shoring
• Waves of M&As
• The Greening of business and the Eco-movement
• Cause marketing

But today’s environment is forcing the hands of those who formerly got by with just a checkbook or over-valued stock. The reality is that transaction and investment money is scarce, so organic good ole’ fashioned elbow grease is the order of the day – that’s how growth needs to be achieved in this climate. In the absence of a deal or push-button solution, this management effort will require new thinking – not just ideas, but how we take advantage of them – innovation at every level. Your communities already have many of the answers – reaching-out and engaging them is both efficient and effective – you just need to know how to do it.

There have been an increasing number of operators in the Ideas Management community fixated on synthesizing innovation – for both the inspiration and perspiration sides of the equation. Ambitious for sure, but from our point-of-view altogether un-necessary - considering the rich, talented, knowledgeable, available, accessible, motivated and relevant resources that lie in wait; and at the ready. Most of these resources only become aware of the other when connected through an idea that holds a mutual interest. And that’s what most passionate people need to find one another – a common link of interest; a passion for something that brings them together, rather than relying on a location, company or other artificial grouping. These passionate folks share a few characteristics; they are:

• Self organizing
• Self-interested
• Self-motivated

There are legions of collaborators out there waiting to get connected with like-minded individuals who are working on an idea that holds a common interest to all its participants. This affinity and motivation have a name: passion. And it is the crucial element that allows birds-of-a-feather to flock together and create truly inspired results.

For every Alexander Graham-Bell there were passionate enablers like Watson in the mix to support the complete innovation process. Sure Marie Curie, Enzo Ferrari and Jonas Salk were pioneers, but they didn’t get there alone. There were armies of ad hoc collaborators that helped sort-out the intricacies of newness and ignore the naysayers. These folks all had the critical element of passion to forge beyond convention and complete the mission – no matter what the odds.

So when you are designing your new innovation process, or re-jigging the one that sits on the shoulder of the innovation expressway with four flat tires, think of who and how you are going to engage to create good ideas and then bring them to fruition – without interrupting business-as-usual:

• Don’t mandate process roles – explain the roles and allow people to volunteer and/or apply for them
• Let people find their comfort zones and allow them to focus on those areas where they think they can most contribute
• Open your process to all that want to participate
• Recognize the extra effort at every value touch-point
• Provide a platform where participants can self-organize and find one another based on interest, skill, experience, and…

…ideas of common interest. Give people what they want for process and they will return the gesture in kind.

For all the (over-) use that the word innovation has received of late, it would appear that the hype is still significantly greater than the promised results.

There is no doubt that innovation is a top priority for leaders in all walks of life. However, many of these same leaders have difficulty getting their organizations to break-out of the “solo home run” syndrome, so as to transform their culture into one that lives, breathes and delivers innovation day-in-day-out; to create a fundamental, permeating and enduring buzz, rather than the “sugar-high” of a one-hit-wonder.

The main hurdles preventing an entrenched ascension to this organizational Nirvana are managerial and relatively easy to fix:

1. the under-development of agile innovation process structure
2. the over-development of risk mitigation
3. the over-dependence on centralized execution

These are simply symptoms of a process malaise that fails to embrace Open Innovation in its essence – and I’m not talking about acquiring a one-off clever invention, slick design or technological improvement from an outside source. Open Innovation means making the process of creating value open and collaborative to a broad and diverse community of stakeholders, so as to achieve incremental, accelerated and measurable results – at every level of the business. It means allowing participants to self-organize around an idea – ad hoc idea teams that work best when driven by:

• the interest that only curiosity can bring
• the task execution that only self-motivation can bring
• the immediacy that only passion can bring
• the diversity that only communities can bring
• the relevant expertise that only the web can bring

This is management innovation of the Open variety – and from our standpoint, the most important incarnation of the kind, as it is the platform that encourages, enables and endows all other forms of innovation.

There has been a lot of attention and activity around the benefits of crowd-sourcing; much of it warranted. But for all the fanfare, the real value remains largely untapped.

There have been a good number of variations and adaptations to the crowd-sourcing exercise: large-scale brainstorming sessions, ideation jams, idea scrums, group challenges... however few organizations have leveraged this tremendous but still somewhat dormant resource for the heavy lifting around innovation; specifically, the significant tasking that goes into every idea end-to-end. This is an important opportunity to consider as organizations from all sectors struggle with getting more done with less. Compounding this logistical conundrum is the need to get more done with increasingly fewer and less-accessible SMEs, who are already the “go to” people for a number of other high-priority roles, mandates and/or projects; the desire to pitch-in on a new idea may be there, but the time to do so may not: choices have to be made, with the sureness of the “here-and-now” tasks routinely trumping the potential of those that are “great-but-maybe”.

Enter your crowd – they can be tapped from any number of stakeholder groups: employees, customers, suppliers, academics, professional groups, communities of practice, social networks... their diversity matched in importance only by the sheer expanse of their numbers; un-limited by geography, time zones or rules of old and driven by interest, affinity, expertise and motivation. I’ll take as many of these external dynamos as I can get – they are driven to produce.

Give these folks a platform to self-organize, a clear mission and a certain reward structure based on success, and stand back. Like a bacteria eating away at cells, they will find opportunities, accelerate tasking, engage others, circumvent road-blocks and produce for the innovation effort organically like no one else – it’s in their nature.

They are common denominators that deliver un-common results.

Listening to innovative ideas means you care; acting on them proves it.

Organizations have many touch-points where good ideas can come in from. How these ideas are processed makes the difference between the positive outcomes of innovation and the negative outcomes of in-action; like for starters: not listening.

I remember one of my business mentors telling me early-on in my career that “you have two ears and only one mouth – so you should listen twice as much as you should speak”. Wise words indeed, as trying to convince people of what they need without first querying their situation is infinitely less effective than understanding it first and only then moving into position to remediate through product or service – this is true whether facing internally or externally.

It would appear that a good many companies who once knew how and when to listen have forgotten this vital part of the success equation. Whether this is a by-product of merged cultures, the pace of contemporary business or the magnitude and complexity brought on by scale, the right hand frequently doesn’t know what the left hand is doing; and the customer…well they can increasingly be left to feel like inconvenient necessities. As the jocular but flawed saying goes: “this would be the ideal business were it not for those pesky customers”.

Well anyone with customers today should be thankful for their loyal patronage and as for the peskiness, maybe one should start listening better instead of opining. Because a customer’s point of view is unique and critically appropriate – they are the ultimate judges of value when it comes to your offering. If they are saying something you don’t want to hear, you should be listening harder - if many are saying the same thing, you know that something has to be done quickly – response is a must. Increasingly, the act of listening seems to have innocuously been replaced by merely being heard; and by lowering the importance of listening to the tokenism of simply hearing makes it simpler to dismiss as noise – thereby turning it into a distraction that can eventually be ignored. Listening implies that there will be follow-up action to satisfy the issue – that demonstrates caring. From an internal perspective, when an employee has an idea, where does it go in your organization? Better yet, where does it stop? Or when supplier has an idea, how does that turn into measurable value? And the customer idea, at what point do the disparate pieces of the organization come together to work on it and bring the whole to a successful outcome? At what point do people stop listening? If you can answer that question definitively, you have found an exact point were the organization stops to care; and where innovation is lost.

The issue of pay-for-performance is one that is never far off the corporate compensation radar, however, a strong case for it's value can increasingly be made these days when it is purposefully woven into an organization's innovation strategy. The premise is this: you do more that is measurable for our innovation effort and we'll do more in some measurable form for you - it's a direct correlation.

This is especially  worth considering  at a time when you have senior management compensation mechanisms under heightened scrutiny and  generally perceived as lob-sided, while the time-honored practice of “Slash & Burn” cost reduction is returning for a repeat engagement to those organizations less gifted at hands-on problem solving, contingency planning and self re-invention.

Markets have changed, customers have changed, employees have changed - the world has changed dramatically in a short period. The tired approaches of old will not get most through the current imbroglio and beyond - we are living through a moment in history that is truly transformational, one which can only be met with a single approach in response: transformation of your own.

Now if you are looking to leverage the innovation effort and make it a centerpiece of your corporate, market and financial strategy going forward, you must attract, excite, engage and motivate the various members that make-up your innovation community. The goals must be clear, the engagement relevant and the quid-pro-quo equitable - any recognition and reward structure needs to be fair, certain and immediate. Driving specific results requires specific direction.

Expecting your folks to jump for joy at the sight of additional work without the recognition to go with it is utterly unrealistic - there has to be some up-side in it for them. The more cynical manager may think themselves clever by threatening their people with job loss to stoke innovation performance, but these antediluvian tactics are tantamount to inviting them start on a job search: their emotional and mental commitment to the customers, partners, position. colleagues...the organization as a whole ends the second this implication is made.

Incentive pay can work well for executives and has proven to work just as well for the rank-and-file involved in the various roles of the innovation process. In fact, according to our own benchmarks, when properly structured and executed, these incentive mechanisms increase ROI by a ratio of 6-to-1. The best part about this relationship is that the financial risks are fully mitigated by the condition of measurable innovation results coming before any incentive rewards are ever paid-out.

Embarking on any new initiative requires a plan that includes a definition of what one is going to do, how one is going to do it and how one will measure success.

This is a Critical Success Factor for Innovation Processes, its practitioners and the leadership that have the expectation of results for the money spent.

Setting performance-metrics goals for both process and role players is not a particularly popular initiative, as it ultimately spells-out more W-O-R-K under the gun. However, if properly prepared and supported, it is always worth the additional effort. Much like an athlete looking to improve their time or achieve a new milestone, pushing the limits of what we are accustomed to is a must. These athletic über-performers push themselves and manage to surpass their current thresholds of excellence to arrive at new personal bests; or better yet, break records. Similarly, organizations can stretch and flex in the same way, but only when given the complete Innovation environment to do so; namely the confidence to strive, the tools to execute and the motivation to succeed.

To arrive at these outcomes it is critical for senior management to not only get involved, but to stay involved. They have to set the Innovation pace for the rest of the organization by targeting desired process performance benchmarks – without them, the overall goal becomes a disjointed and murky target. Benchmark goals can come in specific permutations that affect every level of the process; here are a few:

Much like the aforementioned athlete’s performance goals, process benchmarks calibrated to overall goals have to be part of the Corporate Innovation Plan from Day 1. After all, a long distance runner would not  set-off to improve their time for a specific distance without coordinating their route, hydration and caloric intake to optimize their chances of success – and they would set a target-time for each leg, measuring  intervals and split times to insure there are on pace for success. Without it, how would they know if they’ve improved, succeeded or even arrived?

Because the practice of Innovation is still in its high-growth formative years, there are usually only two kinds of corporate innovation practitioners outside of the service-provider realm: those who have never implemented an innovation process before and those that have but failed in their attempt.

Either way, the need for knowledge, benchmarks, guidance and support are paramount. There is a process rigor that needs to be in place in order to service the innovation program’s administration, tasking and associated activities – it’s an investment that just simply needs to be made if one wants to get things right. To get going quickly, the first steps ironically is backward. The old adage of taking one step back in order to take two forward is an absolute must. Process design and organizational preparedness are critical success factors in getting it right – having the software and getting ideas should be the last two steps – everything in between and thereafter matters a whole lot too; because that’s where the process actually does the work of mobilizing (collaboration) and actualizing (decision-making, implementing and monetizing).

The risks of getting things wrong in the case of innovation programs extend far beyond the obvious; sure the financial ramifications of launching an unsuccessful program will have an immediate impact, but more significant than that is the longer-term image damage that a visible flop can engender – the hangover can last many years and any repeat attempt will have a small army of “Doubting Thomases” spreading the seeds of doubt from the first whiff of a re-launch. This negative promotion can permeate the organization and take-on a life of its own: “ignore it long enough and this program will eventually go away too”. Another latent by-product is confidence in management’s ability and commitment to do innovation. If the cornerstones for success weren’t visibly there for the first go-around (and don’t think the rank-and-file don’t know what those are), it will start any new attempt on the steep side on an incline, fighting for its life from Day 1.

If given the chance, one could come-up with a dozen reasons why not to do innovation now – such as economic pressures. But the current economic situation is more than just a downturn; it is a global re-alignment of power on a macro and micro scale. It is either an amazing opportunity to leap ahead for the visionaries, or an insidious death knell for the meek. With the tightening of credit, the abundant liquidity that so many firms used to grow via acquisition during boom-times has dried-up or become prohibitively expensive. The best option today is to grow organically; and to do this successfully without breaking one’s current flow, a sound innovation process is the key.

There are plenty of success stories out there about Innovation and Idea Systems successes; conversely, there are plenty of examples of Idea Systems going wrong – and in every case, these failures were avoidable. There are common threads to both outcomes which are mutually inclusive:

1. Innovation and Idea systems, whether internally facing, externally facing or both, require visible and sustained senior management support along with bona fide executive sponsorship; without it, there is no feeling of priority among the participant community and absolutely no sense of urgency. Organizations need leadership as do specific initiatives – and in the times we live, organizations desperately need hands-on leadership.
   
   
2. Workflows need to be inclusive, discussed, analyzed, thought-out and agreed-to prior to finalizing a process design – if the organization does not take this necessary step backward, it will trip trying to take two steps forward. Once properly launched, the inertia that your Idea Process develops is difficult to temper and downright impossible to reverse without causing irreparable damage to the image and energy of your program.
   
   
3. Idea development needs to have purposeful tools and timely collaboration to optimize expression, understanding, documentation, financial justification and implementation. If ideas aren’t as fully-baked as possible when arriving at the evaluation/decision-making stage, there is a good chance that:
   
   
   1. The ideas will stop dead in their tracks
   2. These ideas will languish and eventually die
   3. Your process will fast start to lose its evaluators and decision-makers – and soon after, all participation will cease
   4. Resentment will build and finger-pointing will set-in

   Point C is a particularly common and pivotal ailment, as these process role-players are typically your organization’s “go to” people for many other important issues – if they are suddenly called upon to roll-up their sleeves because the incoming ideas assigned to them are poorly put together or under-developed, there is a 100% chance they’ll increasingly opt-out of new idea mandates, or worse, completely disengage on the spot – there are just too many other important things to get at and not enough time to do them all. Evaluators and decision makers expect to evaluate and decide – it is imperative that they get well developed and well expressed ideas to keep them engaged.
   

4. There needs to be a equitable, inclusive and exciting Rewards & Recognition program to first garner attention and then drive participation, collaboration and tasking. Without it, why should anyone get excited about doing even more work than they are doing already? Would you? There has to be something in it for everyone if you want all the gears in the people machinery to mesh.
   

5. Communications have to be outstanding and comprehensive to capture the participant’s imagination, build trust and prompt action. They also have to have a media plan and overall strategy of sustainability because we are competing for the attention of people that are busy with all the things people get busy with – if you want your program to be top-of-mind with your user community, reach them often and in creative ways that cut through the noise and clutter. It is also critical to keep users informed at all process levels as to the movement and outcomes of ideas that they’ve had a hand in as well as the overall process performance.

These are the basic pillars of success that no Innovation and Idea Management Process can live without – not that complicated really. Planning, commitment, execution and staying the course is up to the leadership.