Common innovation approaches

Innovation can be driven and managed closely in the organization or the innovation process can be left to the employees and they can be given just extremely broad goals about the results of their ideas. All the innovation approaches work and they deliver some results. The role of HR is to discover the approach of the company to innovation and it has to set the tools correctly to support the innovation effort to meet the main criteria to enable the creativity inside the organization.

Organizations use several approaches to innovation and all deliver the results. The 3M and General Electric are the common examples of the opposite approaches to innovation. 3M is a company, which just sets the time limit to innovation and leaves its employees to focus the innovation effort. They have 10% of the working time allocated to their own projects and they just have to agree 3M will use the results. Most of the effort does not bring results, but Post-It is the common example of the innovation effort done during the free allocation of the working time. General Electric (GE) has a detailed project methodology, which supports innovation. It is called DMAIC and it is based on Six Sigma methodology. The employees are put together and they innovate the current processes and products.

Which innovation approach can be chosen?

The organization can choose from three main innovation principles, which support the innovation process:

• Chaos
• Methodology
• Competition driven

Chaos can look strange, but most organizations apply such innovation approach and it works quite well for them. When the management is mature enough to recognize the right innovations and the management recognizes the employees bringing best ideas to the business, the un-managed approach to innovation can work best. No one is creative, when he or she is told to be creative.

The methodology driven approach to innovation gives a full control to the organization and the results are well documented. This approach looks best in the beginning, but it can kill the creativity easily, when it is exhausted. The project manager has to use the brain, which project tools will be used, otherwise the project meetings can be about filling tables and documents and the creativity of employees is focused on minimizing the project administration overhead and it is not focused on innovation itself.

The competition driven innovation is a combination of the chaos and methodology driven approaches. The management sets the vision and the goal and the employees are welcome to participate in the innovation competition. The winner is recognized and rewarded by the organization for bringing the best result. It sound sexy, but it bring problems. Evaluating the results of the competition is extremely hard and the management has to be objective and it can bring huge issues among employees participating in the competition. The more advanced approach is to select several options and to leave the winning employees to bring with a common innovation proposal. This usually leads to stronger team cooperation and it improves the result a lot.