Quality of Internal Innovation - low or really low

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Open innovation programs often rely on the inputs of internal employees for ideation. What are companies doing to try to increase the quality of the ideas being generated?

Idea Generation
Platforms
Ideation & Innovation
Innovation Management
Thomas O'Malley
77 months ago

32 answers

7

In 2011, I launched the employee open innovation program at UnitedHealth Group (Fortune 6). In our first year we ran 11 events (all time-based challenges), and by 2015 we were running 150+ events (75% challenges). The difficulty with the quality of input was immediately apparent and something that has been an ongoing need. The issue is that quality is a function of effort, both for the participants but also for the filtering/selection process. I probably can't outline everything we did to improve quality but keep in mind that there is also a balance. The side effect of an open innovation program is engagement. So the harder you make the process, you will naturally have a decrease in participation unless you create other actions that users can take to stay engaged. No matter what you do, improving quality means you will decrease ideation. For metrics driven organizations, where more=better, getting less ideas will seem like a contradiction. For example, every year we ran a CEO challenge. By topic, year after year, we implemented more and more strategies to increase quality which also reduced the total volume of ideas. When your CEO and executives want to see the year over year number of ideas and you show them a smaller number each time, that causes some head scratching and takes some explaining around strategy and intended results. BTW, we also increased total engagement year over year, but that's a different explanation.
Here are just a few ways you can improve quality.
Form fields: The default for any idea challenges is title and description. This will yield maximum idea count and also introduce the biggest range of response quality. We saw that some people were better at articulating their ideas and the context/need than others. So we increased the number of fields to get better information and to put ideas on an equal playing field when filtering and selecting. For example, our "standard" form became the following questions (there where various wordings as we iterated but this will give you the gist). Problem. User/Audience. Status quo (what is the user doing without the solution in place). Solution. Value proposition (how is the solution better than the status quo). Add more fields, improve quality, reduce idea count. It's a simple and reliable formula.
Teamwork: Having ideas submitted by teams is guaranteed to produce better results. In fact, running lunch-and-learn workshops and collaboration sessions tended to improve the overall quality of submissions.
Coaching/Mentors: Having a trained and capable idea mentor assigned to each idea to read and give feedback was one of the best methods for getting quality. An idea coach is not supposed to pass judgment or otherwise engage too deeply in the concept (thereby potentially altering the idea submitter's value through their own bias). Rather, it was intended to be a feedback mechanism reflecting understanding. When the ideator describes the problem, does the coach understand the submitter and if not, why not. And down the form for all of the responses.
There are many more strategies. And that's the point, be strategic. Don't think that a crowd of people and a digital submission tool is the magic bean to grow breakthrough ideas. Ideation is by its very nature raw and unrefined. Quality comes from processes designed to produce quality.

Gregory Hicks
77 months ago
I wish I could give you more points for this...terrific input, thank you! - Thomas 77 months ago
Teamwork and collaboration as you mentioned are the most powerful tools i've implemented; increasing the diversity of the innovators has significantly imrpoved quality, especially if that diversity is someone completely unaware of the problem. Mentors/coaches strongly resonates with me since most ideators are not good salespeople or have true understanding of thier customer. - Cory 76 months ago
Just wondering: might it help to have a series of submissions/judging sessions and advancement of the better ideas to a new level? Also, how about having individuals and teams work with mentors to develop ideas along the way? This may have collateral benefits, as well. - Howard 68 months ago
In select industries mentoring and coaching have a greater impact on outcomes related to innovation. Consider a company that has brilliant scientists, frequently sharing thoughts with peers and those less experienced. Kinda like grad school on steriods. It works, It shortens R&D development time, it keeps folks fired up, progress accelerates. The cost: time to let them interact frequently. - Sandy 66 months ago
Health Care and Medicine is DIFFERENT! - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
Employees are generally not happy at UHC; netiher are the doctors; IMHO and experience - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
5

Thomas O'Malley What drives true innovation in a company is going to be culture and employee engagement.
This question you asked made me think about an article from a few years ago about how Google supposedly encourages their employees to spend 20% of their time on innovation. I considered this when I worked at SpaceX, because even though we spent a lot of time on innovation, we also often worked 150% or even 200%+ of the typical work week for Americans. If you are spending 20% on innovation, but you are working 50 hours (120%) a week to create are you really gaining anything? There is a lot of evidence out there supporting that people are not more productive when they work more hours. I like to think that quality work is more important than quantity of time. So where does that leave us?
Increasing quality work at a company comes down to a few factors:

  1. Hiring practices
  2. Employees feel valued
  3. Management supports employees (put the money where their mouths are)

With regards to innovation, in practice this means:

  1. You hire well. Forget about "behavioral interviewing" and actually follow-up on references. Don't choose people based on what they are on paper, but instead by their experience and how well they interact with your team.
  2. Make employees feel valued by showing you value their time and appreciate their efforts. Monetary reward systems have been shown to be ineffective. Instead, innovation drivers like managers and c-suite should take time in their day to make genuine connections with employees at all levels and spend most of that time listening and not talking. It's amazing how positively people respond to just being heard.
  3. That you give employees protected time at work to spend on innovation without affecting work-life balance. Maybe instead of all employees getting time for this, you hire a few full-time innovators and let them spend time with different job functions/departments to help educate and inspire them. Play around with it and see what works.
Katie S
77 months ago
Wow Katie, interesting approach - especially your pont on full-time innovators. Thanks, its triggered a few ideas - Matthew 74 months ago
Interesting - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
4

You get what you measure or reward. It is important to define clear objectives to inspire ideation. It is also important to publicly reward the types of ideas you are looking for to drive ideas in the right direction. However, when leaders say they have a problem with quality of ideas, I question whether they are familiar with what they have. Often I have seen great ideas languish due to lack of resources (people or funding). Actually developing innovative ideas can be very risky and expensive.

Dawn Houghton
77 months ago
"You get what you measure or reward?" SURE - This is an incentive to scam. Old school. - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
3

FYI - Using the term "internal innovation" is a giant mistake unto itself.....all innovation, one way another should involve the whole ecosytem. Whether using a service like Convetit, your own staff and partners and customers and or external consultants and colleagues, nothing should exclusively internal but the simply incremental. That of course is not innovation - its simple evolutionary progress.

Adam Malofsky, PhD
77 months ago
Agreed - oxymoron - MORON. - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
2

This is a very rich topic, one that I have many thoughts on.
Thequestion as posed, assumes that the quality of internally generated ideas is low. I think a good place to start discussion on this topic is to create a common definition for idea quality and also, to decide who should evaluate ideas to determine their merit.
In corporate open innovation operations, the standards for adoption of any submission (internal or external) are often exceptionally high, as one might expect.
As a result, only ideas that have the strongest technical validation supporting them can survive intense scrutiny.
In most open innovation operations, submissions are evaluated by technical people who judge technical merit and fit with existing needs, versus business persons who might judge the idea's business building potential...separate from technical merit.
As you can see, there is a lot more to the question than might appear at first glance.

Michael Fruhling
77 months ago
I agree with Michael. Consider this point; having really creative and innovative people does not always mean you get a lot of actionable, useful, and profitable ideas. You generally get a wide range of innovative things to explore, but as we know, few will translate into high value for a company. But is we do not listen to creative contributors we lose out, the culture and the company lag hehind. - Sandy 66 months ago
OK - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
2

We've worked with many companies do accelerate and improve innovation, especially for the transformative type.
What we can say from that 30 plus years of experience is that without powerful leadership creating and communicating the context and principles of the company such that the customers, the spidererd set of other influencers from from competitors to suppliers to stockholders to the customer's customers you will fail. I do not care who you hire, i dont care about incentives or culture. Without a strongly comunicated, peristently evolving and analyzed context driving decision making at all levels versus micromanagement and a thousand commitees none of the latter matter at all.
That said, you can now understand how you and your firm fit and how you as a firm and as employees will behave. Now you can then much more clearly and with far less direction understand as an employee or other stakeholder exactly what you need to do, what your role is and act accordingly. yiu cna collaborate more effectively and broadly and interact with the outside world to understand needs and serve them appropriately.
The next requirement is autonomy but within clear, crisp principles and guidelines of what success looks like generally versus to a bizarre Nth degree. People need freedom to not only act upon and pursue and evaluate opportunities but also the general measures and the ability to evaluate and test for compliance and validation to gain consensus and assistance to move forward. Whether a line worker, an analayst or division president, thismis critical to innovation.
In the end, highly varied industries will compensate as needed but without the chance for an individual to have a big win, whatever that is to them, they won't care about innovation. No powerful compensation as they see it no innovation.
All that above is only the start, the foundation. Innovation itself is vastly misunderstood. its a topic for another response. Still, do the latter starting with a kick ass CEO and youll likely have far more success than failure.
Open innovation...its an over rated fad that's not produced much beyond too much consulting revenue typically for folks who have likely never really innivated much themselves. It's just a tool and its great in certain but not many cases that needs the right folks at the right time and no more.

Adam Malofsky, PhD
77 months ago
Thanks - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
2

To add some aspects that haven't been mentioned yet, the answer to a question will often varry on how the question is worded and what medium the answer is given. If an engineering team is asked to develop an innovative solution within a set of (percieved) customer requirements with a solution formulated with "words", the propositions may not be any different than what currently exists in a product or a repeated concept.
To increase quality, break your problem statement down to its basic function (Screwdriver = transit torque), and ask how else to provide that function utilizing various non-traditional mediums like drawing pictures, modelling clay, pile of grass, children's toys, or random assortment of items.
This works with the premise that nothing new can be created, and everything already exists; innovation ocurs when 2 or more things are combined in a new way. My method attempts to increase the potential for random interactions never before seen when solving the problem.

Cory Nation
76 months ago
Interesting - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
2

My simple answer is that culture is upstream of innovation. If you have a culture that is receptive to, and encourages innovation, you will get more, and better quality ideas. We can implement all of the stage gates, forms, etc that we can come up with, but if the culture doesn't support innovation well, you aren't going to get much of it. Along with (perhaps part of) that culture needs to be senior leadership support, not just permission, but active, involved support even to the point of cheer leading.

Michael Meehan, CMRP, CRL, CMM
76 months ago
OK - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
2

To increase the quality of innovation and ideas -- below are 3 ideas, spurred by companies seeking revenue growth (through services, software and digital/tech-infused products)

Michael Franken
74 months ago
Appreciate - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
1

Area's that are most helpful imho

  • Campaigns based on strategic area's that you want to see solved
  • using diverse teams
  • making sure that all teams have a coach if they want
  • exposing employees also to other environments/companies to get inspired
  • teaching employees idea-improvement methodologies
Frank Dethier
77 months ago
Great thanks - Thomas 77 months ago
DITTO - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
1

A way to improve idea quality is to define clearly what constitutes a "good" idea, given the problem at-hand:
For instance:
-Represents a meaningful point of difference versus existing market offerings.

  • Must have demonstrated technical proof of efficacy,
  • Must be a protected or protectable idea,
  • Does not require new capital equipment in order to implement.

The above are only examples. The point is, if companies are very clear about what success must look like, only those with qualified solutions will participate. Conversely, many people will elect not to participate. And that is perfectly fine, if the company is seeking real, close-in solutions.

Michael Fruhling
77 months ago
Short and sweet. Thanks - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
1

This is a rich topic indeed.
From a pure impact point of view (unlocking incremental growth), there are several ways to help innovations.
The obvious one which most industries have adopted is to ensure a stage gate process is estsblished, with clear decision milestones and requirements to pass each gate.
Aspects like technical feasibility, manufacturing and consumer testing sre part of these.
There are today very robust methodogies to assess the potential of new ideas with great accuracy, very early in the process (i.e before any investment is made).

Giulia Iorio-Ndlovu
77 months ago
OK - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
1

The question I always ask around internal innovation is, how do you measure your output?
What criteria do you use to measure the ideas that are generated?
As a lifelong creative director, I've written at length about this, and the article below presents my views in simple terms.
https://medium.com/@donsmith_64733/on-the-recognition-of-valuable-ideas-f6189e92e7c0

I've added the text below too.

Do you create value? Do you have values?
We’ll start with a different question. Can you recognise valuable ideas?
There many prefixes to the word ‘idea’. Big ideas, good ideas, bad ideas, new ideas, old ideas, crazy ideas.
The only ideas that truly matter, and gain traction, are valuable ideas.
And I don’t simply mean commercially valuable. I use valuable as a term in its truest definition: The regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something.
We can all critique an idea, but do most of us actually have a criteria with which to judge an idea against? The answer, surprisingly, is no.
So let us look at a simple criteria.
Ideas have two aspects. Their nature and their purpose. Their nature is binary but their purpose can be wide reaching.
Arguably, all that really matters is their purpose, this is where value lies, but let’s begin with the duality of their nature.
An idea will be either innovative or inventive. The difference is quite simple. Our world is a collection of systems. And each system has component parts.
An innovative idea will create a better component part within a system. An inventive idea will create a better system. Russ Ackoff (your Google homework) talked about this as continuous improvement and discontinuous improvement. If you understand this, it becomes easier to judge an idea. Is it innovative or is it inventive?
If the answer is neither, chances are you’re looking at a variation of an existing idea. Reject it.
The purpose of an idea is a little more complex. However, it invariably begins with human behaviour. Understanding behavioural psychology is critical in developing your judgement of an idea’s purpose. To this end I urge you to consume the works of Danny KahnemanBJ Fogg and Clay Christensen. Danny and BJ focus on our human nature, whereas Clay takes a more commercial viewpoint.
His new book ‘Competing against luck’ introduces Jobs Theory. Which looks at balancing the job someone needs done, against the capacity for a product or service to fulfil that job. And the jobs we need done are not always rational or intuitive, as Danny will tell you.
Defining the ‘job’ is where you can understand an idea’s purpose.
Don’t sell a pencil to someone who needs to make an indelible mark.
There is no academic course that I know of that combines these theories and methods to teach better assessment of ideas. So whether you’re a creative director, a CEO or a venture capitalist, the above approach will help you assess whether an idea is valuable.
If it is innovative or inventive and has a purpose, it is valuable. And potentially disruptive.

Don Smith
76 months ago
Wow. Very helpful. - Thomas 73 months ago
A bit pedantic; but thanks - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
1

“Disruption” is in fashion today, to stop the current and give opportunity to the new. Disruption does not automatically mean that something will be implemented, but that a break can be used to think about the status quo and potential alternatives. A new decision making process will choose between continuing on the known path or change to a new one.

For an individual regular disruptions are required to avoid a “tunnel vision” and related behavior risks. In our modern times it gets more and more complicated to get a break, as thanks to connected smart devices employees read and answer their emails not only inside their regular working hours, but also before and after, including on week-ends and holidays. Even the classic TV-evening does not give the required escape, as tablet and smart phones became a regular “second screen” to switch the eyes between TV and computer.

Important possibility for disruption are the employee’s holidays or also business travels. “Traveling educates” is not only a phrase, but new locations and meeting other people are always a source of inspiration. The individual connects the new impression with his or her actual life and tasks. After the time off, such new ideas can make the person re-think his or her tasks and, hopefully, make such more effective, including to invent.

The company’s HR department shall ensure that employees take their annual holidays and furthermore that over-time gets limited. Employees with a “private life” receive input from different settings. Inspirations and fresh ideas get back to the company and due to this, the employee gets more valuable for the organization. Bill Gates understood this relation and once said: “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” He formulated it provocative, because being outside the office does not mean being lazy, as leisure time can be used actively.

Especially today, where jobs get automatized by robots and AI, the company shall be aware that on positions where we need human employees, we have to treat them as such and not similar to machines. If not, humans are vulnerable for failures and errors. Humans treated as humans, develop the skills to protect themselves against negative psychological biases.

Patrick Henz
76 months ago
Agreed; mostly. - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
1

Everyone....hope this is all somehow helpful. This is how we do transformational innovation rather successfully.

Heres our White Paper on Adaptive Innovation.

The best innovation book somewhat recently? "Where Good Ideas Come From" by Steven Johnson.

Here's his Ted Talk - one of the best I've ever heard.

Adam Malofsky
Malofsky@elemence.net

Adam Malofsky, PhD
76 months ago
Great insight - Marko 73 months ago
THANKS - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
1

In my past, the best way to develop ideas is to have a problem to solve to a blue sky idea to shoot for. Don't just ask how to do it. Deconstruct it. I do you not do it. Example, I received the best responses in a ideation session for the following: cost savings. The team went around the room: make this cheaper, make this faster, change this material. Many of which were followed by: you can't to that. When turning the tables and asking how to makes this more expensive, immediately solutions came two surface, make two of those boards. The boards were never in the consideration. After the excercise was over, we were able to compare what the president would say when asked.

Marko Krutyholowa
73 months ago
HUGE GOALS - Moon Walk - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
1

"Quality of Internal Innovation - low or really low


Open innovation programs often rely on the inputs of internal employees for ideation. What are companies doing to try to increase the quality of the ideas being generated?"

Couple of comments in this topic.

Open Innovation in practice is both an internal and external process. Few companies have any internal form of Open Innovation, and far fewer engage with the outside world to leverage or exploit their internal innovations and intellectual property resulting from the ideation process.

Internal companies also frequently lack any type of process that formally evaluates ideas as it relates to their currently active business plan. Some most innovation becomes and extracurricular activity (albeit internal in most instances).

Many companies implement formal processes for product development, sales processes, marketing processes, and many others, but few build and sustain the processes they need to capture the most relevant and innovative ideas in a productive and sustainable manner.

Sandy Waters
66 months ago
An interesting point that I totally agree. Open innovation initiatives should also promote internal forms of open innovation. - Fernando 66 months ago
ok - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
1

When talking about open innovation, I feel the best way is to the company incorporate "mature" startups that already have a good product and service in the market, with real clients and revenues that match the company need of expanding a market or expanding to a different field. Instead of accelerating an early stage startups with ideas and innovation that are not proved, tested yet demanding time and investment in a long term.

Marcio Dupont
41 months ago
0

Structuring innovation is more likely to fail than succeed given the bureacracy and culture in most organizations today.
More innovation is typically external to the larger organizations from what I've seen - and increasing over the past 10 years.

Randy Vogenberg, PhD
77 months ago
Of course! - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
0

the way i look at innovation is as following:

  • Everone in the organization need to understand why they come to work and how they make a difference. At the end of day - humans, we :) create innovation to solve a problem not machines or software. Do we really know how to delivery the value to our customers and what are the issues in our sales, marketing, product development and support services. To understand that we need a good quality management, if you look at any organizaiton which has good quality management philosophy in their organizations they are most of the time innovating as quality brings up the issues and customer feedback provides the insight. That is the reason digial assurance is the way to innovate.
Parminder Sohal
77 months ago
Really? - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
0

It depends on what you mean by innovation and by quality. If you are looking for something that impact your customer base (as most processes and products do) there should be input from voices outside the immediate business unit.
Being too insular by only engaging internal employees in innovation can be limiting. Even if it is an internal issue, it might be good to incorporate outside thinking.
If possible include:

  • Customer voice - the impact of any changes or innovations have on customers cannot be underestimated
  • Internal "outside" voice - sometimes when too close to the issue at hand and outside the business area voice can help see the forest
  • Consider looking at external boards such as these to help incorporate out of the box thinking

Vera Rulon
76 months ago
Alpha, beta and gamma testing! - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
0

we try to follow best practises ,ask lots of questions from our customers .send out satisfaction surveys . and have benchmarks and metrics which we are follow when have customer engagements

amit patel
74 months ago
OK - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
0

this is really depends on a company and and what position employee has in it . some jobs are dead end jobs and some companies also in this category .also lots depend on a management and access to capital

amit patel
74 months ago
Say what - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
0

The question really should be 'When you innovate, do you manage opportunities or do you manage each other?"

Howard Moskowitz
73 months ago
I would say that you manage who is in the room. There tend to be what I call idea zealots. Always have an idea and their idea is the best. These always tend to be the best influences as well. Having these individuals as part of a team managing the opportunities as they arrive would be most powerfull as they can influence management of the best opportunity. - Marko 73 months ago
MANAGEMENT REGARDLESS = Is Not innovation - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
0

Using those that you depend on to deliver your next wave of innovation is key.
TRY: SUPPLIER BASED INNOVATION: They Bring Their Ideas To Help Drive The Supply Chain
TRY: CUSTOMER ENGINEERING DAY: In Medical Devices and Other Industries Customers Like to Re-engineer may of the products we design engaging better ideas.

These are two examples that will drive your bottom line in INNOVATION. I will be more than happy to share a presentation around a best practice or a summary of innovation methods with those that may be interested,

Marko Krutyholowa
73 months ago
Marko, I would argue that supplier-based innovation has become a foundation for corporate innovation....and its become an expectation for suppliers to remain in the "inner circle". This doesn't guarantee that the ideas are "better quality", but as a prioritiy, one assumes they are bringing their best games forward. - Michael 73 months ago
Michael. You are correct. Every innovation session needs to be facilitated, even a supplier innovation session. Giving guidance to a team no matter where they are from goes a great deal of distance in ensuing that they succeed or even get to a point where they make new discoveries. Michael direct innovators to shoot for the moon. This way, when they miss we will be blessed with stars. - Marko 73 months ago
Thanks - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
0

I was charted and successfull in increasing both internal innovation within my own operating company as well as 22 others. This spanned functions from engineering, RnD, marketing, legal, product development, and IT.
The process involved baselining traditional innovation sessions which varied anywhere from 4 hours to 2 days. What I found was similar across all. Individuals did not understand what a good idea was. Meaning how to take their idea from their mind or a napkin, document it in either a patent, a measurable business or marketing plan, or demonstrate it's value to senior management.
I quickly seized on the opportunity defining the process for an engineer to develop a patent that had an 80 percent chance of being approved. A suite of automated tools took the idea screened it for validity, built other ideas around it, further increasing its value, and automated drafting, virtual modeling and process modeling built out the idea into a real concept ready to be screened. This system worked well for marketing and legal in defining white space where development could work as well as for it to identify the best corporate tools to support to harness and share this innovation best practice. Gone were the days where one or two subject matter experts dominated an ideation session and only 10 ideas came from the session. Ideas for the most part that existed before. The sessions became active a flurry of data and true innovation where hundred potential viable strategic concepts exited the door. Now if we could fund them all!

Marko Krutyholowa
73 months ago
Thanks - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
0

You always have to remember that innovation is a process an internal innovation requires a pipeline of ideas or issues to address. In this way you have define where best the ideas might come from and where they might go. The key to good, bad or indifferent is the attitude of the team to spontaneous development that they may define as not part of their role.

It is important to regularly re invigorate the teams enthusiasm and incentivise productive progress (incentives can range from gratitude and praise for contributions to financial bonus's as ideas gain momentum and pass key milestones). This is the job for the facilitator and/or team leader who will run different exercises with the team encouraging their creative talents and building these into productive innovative themes and projects. You have to recognise the limitations of individuals in the team and those that simply absorb what you tell them without actually doing anything (Sponges as I call then). In unlocking this apathy or lack of effort is key to achieving low or really low outcomes - or good and very good outcomes.

When you get it right your team will come to you and push you into developing and managing their ideas and sometimes your own.

Paul D
72 months ago
Pipeline = evolution - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
0

In another forum, the moderator mentioned a number of potential influences on innovation, which included Taxation, Govenrmental Stability and a few others. I'm focusing here on WHAT is innovated more than HOW innovation is fostered.

The focus needs to be on fostering good innovation, as opposed to self-serving innovation. I think of self-serving innovation as that which benefits the innovator but not society. For example, pharma companies often game the patent system by tweaking a drug coming close to the end of its protected period just enough to obtain an extension on the patent but not enough to require another trip through the regulatory approval process. This results in a lot of time, energy and resources spent on defending the profitability of a product that represents little improvement but denies generic manufacturers the opportunity to create a cost-saving alternative. Drug owners benefit but society doesn't.

As for taxation, I don't think it's purely a matter of high or low taxes but more a matter of what is deductible and for how long. For instance, should pharma companies be able to deduct the costs of playing the game I describe above? I think not; however, it's pretty difficult to discriminate research efforts geared toward protecting patents from efforts aimed at discovering new drugs. I am actually not sure whether the companies are obligated to assign the expenses to individual products but it probably wouldn't be too hard to shift them between them after the fact. I know this sounds a bit jaded, but I'm pretty convinced it could and would happen.

I am also not sure how much government stability matters as much as how stable the polices that define the innovation space are. As we have seen, modifying rules on depreciation expense write-offs can have a major impact on capital spending and investment. Policies that change frequently can be just as detrimental as those that disfavor them.

So, fostering innovation is a highly complex matter and fostering the kind that is most beneficial, even more so.

Howard W
68 months ago
Howard, it is more likely that lobbyists carry out far more detrimental activities by working their magic against how government reaches to breakthroughs in the phama field. Consider the day with advent of gene theraphy that the vast majority of drugs are made obsolete by the elimination of long term edicinal requirements. Cure diabetes, cure cancers, avoid the need for surgery altogether. - Sandy 66 months ago
. . . or, for that matter, pharma companies not investing in treatments that are short-term. There's nowhere near as much money to be made in vaxines that are given once early in life as there is in drugs for chronic conditions that are taken over a lifetime. - Howard 66 months ago
True dat! - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
0

I've run many innovation programs for many firms and there is always a disconnect between what leadership is expecting and what comes out of them. When you address this disconnect, you get the big ideas.

Leadership expects big, bold, billion dollar ideas, and typically we get incremental improvements. I've seen this repeated many times. While incremental innovation is great, it usually doesn't move the needle far enough.

We fix this by using futurist techniques to disconnect the contributing employees cognitive mindset from the day-to-day, and set them in a future time, allowing them a greener field to play in and generate new, disruptive ideas.

These "futurist" innovation programs not only generate disruptive ideas, they also sometimes create interesting possibly patentable ideas, as well as greatly improve employee engagement.

Chris Kalaboukis
66 months ago
I ask the senior leadership team a qualifying questions when assessing their situation to set the expectations, I ask them what are they prepared to offer or sacrifice to get that really significant impactful idea to market. Often the answers are themselves small or incremental. We play a game, "bet the ranch" highlighting the pluses and minuses of thinking big. We get breakthroughs often that way - Sandy 66 months ago
Sounds like brain storming, to me. Old School - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
0

I have worked with several organizations on open innovation. Two failures. One is that individuals or even facilitators are not familiar with the needs nor the decision making process of the layers of management that review or approve the ideas. Many times you end up with the not invented here syndrome. Second, many ideas although they are a billion dollar idea are just ideas not innovations until proven feasible and have costs and timing associated with their implementation. As a shareholder in many companies I don't invest in just ideas I invest in innovations rooted in feasibility and sound ROI.

Now how to implement such a mechanism during ideation. Well not all of us can come up with ideas. Some are good at realization, and some at planning, etc. This is what our leaders would like to see.

Marko Krutyholowa
66 months ago
Interesting points Marko. As a facilitator engaging with the senior management team much of the time, I have found that my role is to get them talking about the inventory of their processes (from ideation to decision making and beyond into the entire end to end customer journey to purchase). What I typically find is they are unaware of their processes and make wrong assumptions about them. - Sandy 66 months ago
BTW, my first step is a discovery exploration where I perform a forensic assessment of how their processes are working to highlight possible areas for improvement. I do not charge for the assessment, but offer a detailed set of follow on activities to pinpoint performance areas they wish to improve and the investments required to achieve the goals we agree upon. - Sandy 66 months ago
U can' t plan innovation; it happens organically. - Dr. David E. 63 months ago
0

Setup a small innovation Division within a company that works like a Startup.

Dr. Mazlan Abbas
59 months ago
0

When I worked at Dell EMC, they ran an innovation contest a couple times a year; there would be a couple dozen submissions, then down to the top 3. Each of the pitches would be fully developed and I was involved in at least 4 pitch sessions and a finalist for one of them. I feel they do this to get great ideas, then assign them to other departments and regions while not granting the originator the credit or the opportunity to develop and oversee the project.

Internal politics, friendship favors, and inclusionary tactics got in the way. I know because I still stay in touch with people I worked with and they told me that my ideas were put to use even though I was strung along with promises of meetings with leaders and told it would be funded at a lower level, but then magically it was not marketable or 'ready'.

It's akin to having an artist do work "on spec" (for free), in order to earn the promise of exposure and promotion. But they take the idea, run with it and an executive or board member gets the glory.

</rant>

Troy Vera
57 months ago

Have some input?