Managing for Innovation
Managing for innovation is a Baldrige core value. According to the Criteria, “innovation means making meaningful change to improve your products, services, programs, processes, operations, and business model to create new value for the organization’s stakeholders.”
It’s not just about being creative: It’s about making creative change. Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Timble spent a decade studying innovation, writing a book that presents best practices for executing an innovation initiative called The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge. They asked thousands of executives at Fortune 500 companies to rate their companies’ innovation skills on a scale of one (poor) to ten (world-class). Generating ideas got an average score of 6. Commercializing them—turning ideas into meaningful change—received an average score of 1.
In other words, most organizations are pretty good at coming up with ideas and very bad at acting on them. To remedy this situation, Govindarajan and Timble devote their book to describing the nature and work of dedicated innovation teams because, as they note, “innovation is by nature non-routine and uncertain.”
You can get a jump on developing processes that solve the execution challenge by improving your responses to these key questions about innovation in the Baldrige Criteria:
- How do senior leaders create an environment for innovation?
- How do you innovate product offerings to meet customer requirements?
- How do you select and use comparative data and information to support innovation?
- How do you translate organizational review findings into opportunities for innovation?
- How does your learning and development system address innovation?
- How do you innovate your overall work system?
- How do you innovate your work processes?
- How are work process improvements and lessons learned shared with other units and processes to drive innovation?
To read more about innovation, click on these articles:
- Anticipating Disruptive Change
- Creating a Unique Customer Experience
- Revolutionary Thinking
- The Top Innovative Companies
- A Healthcare Innovator
- 10 Healthcare Innovations
(4 votes, average: 4.25 out of 5)
Loading ...
