Heidi Hattendorf
Director
of Innovation Development
Motorola Solutions
Great ideas
can come from anywhere. This includes:
- Outside in – customer and partner feedback, consumer technology and market trends
- Top down – executive vision, existing products or technology framework
- Inside out – your employees’ domain, customer and business knowledge
At Motorola
Solutions, our process for “outside in” and “top down” innovation is based off
of immersive customer research. We observe and work side by side with our
customers. For example, we put on uniforms, participate in fire and SWAT
training, ride along on patrol and follow first responders as they address
emergencies. We do this to better understand their personal challenges and
end-to-end operations, and then we identify opportunities to innovate to help
them be their best in the moments that matter.
From an
“inside out” perspective, we have an innovation framework that takes internal
crowd sourcing to a new level, giving us a balanced approach to cultivating
employees’ best ideas and protecting them through our patent strategy. These
seven steps will help you implement a similar “inside out” approach to
innovation at your company.
Step 1: Create a Scalable Platform for
Success
An
innovation framework is a global, scalable platform created to harness the
creative talents of your employees while staying in alignment with your corporate
strategy. It’s a strategic approach to innovation from the inside out that
provides a way to act on new ideas. And without a framework, you would just
have a collection of ideas.
The goals
for an innovation framework are straightforward:
1. Positively impact your organizational
culture;
2. Increase employee engagement in the
innovation process; and
3. Generate a constant stream of ideas
that have measurable business impact.
A framework,
infused with social media tools, helps facilitate collaboration among global
employees and creates an online environment (with offline local leadership)
where they can build on existing ideas, comment, vote, or submit their own
ideas. In our innovation framework, we welcome random breakthrough ideas. However,
we have found that building targeted challenges (see “step 5”) helps us build
on our collective expertise from across the globe.
For example,
we are creating a global, virtual water-cooler conversation and ideas exchange.
Employees from Poland are exchanging ideas with others in Malaysia and the
U.S., and seeing comments by teams in China, Germany and the U.K. Now that’s
powerful!
Step 2: Establish the Right Organizational
Principles
A key to
promoting innovation across your organization is to establish a community of
innovation champions. They are highly-talented, hand-picked advocates with
extensive business connections and reach who represent business units and
regional teams. They promote a powerful exchange of ideas for large challenges that
have a significant impact on the business. At Motorola Solutions, they support
our hub-and-spoke innovation framework model that is centralized within our
Chief Technology Office.
Step 3: Engage your Organization’s
Employees
The true
test of any concept is how others ultimately grasp and accept it, and make it
their own. Bringing the right people together in the beginning can mean a
better chance for success in the end. That’s the power of the innovation
framework and the network of innovation champions that support it. They
consistently promote, evangelize, coach and encourage teams to innovate.
Because innovation champions are embedded in the businesses where decisions to
adopt new ideas are made, they are the ideal candidates to evaluate, challenge
and decide whether to bank ideas or pursue them. This close coupling of
resources is essential to the success and sustainability of the program.
Step 4: Build an Idea Management Tool
An idea
management system comprises a critical part of the innovation framework. It
makes it easy for employees to participate and brings transparency to this
process. Ours begins with an interactive portal where every idea is tracked and
a history is established. All ideas submitted must be reviewed and feedback is
stored in the system. As ideas progress, innovators are automatically updated
when a new state is reached or a comment is submitted. The tool also supports
social collaboration with both innovation champions and subject-matter experts
to filter ideas and focus more resources around high-potential ones.
Step 5: Focus on Targeted Innovation
In addition
to fostering the open exchange of ideas, having an innovation framework also
functions to challenge internal stakeholders to solve specific problems. We
call this “targeted innovation.” It begins with a challenge from a business,
customer or industry trend. Background, scope and duration information is
provided to ensure focus is applied to the right areas. By focusing ideation
activities where there is a business need, the probability of a concept being
adopted is much greater.
When we
first established our innovation framework, we used targeted innovation
campaigns—focused on improvements to existing products and features—to train
employees on this new approach to collaboration and innovation. These have
since evolved to address cross-business and technology challenges to spur more
disruptive thinking and ideas.
Step 6: Manage the Backend of Innovation
A rigorous
triage process helps ensure that ideas are reviewed frequently and efficiently.
Concepts that immediately show promise or align to business strategy move
forward, while those that do not are banked for later consideration. This
process consists of a number of idea states, beginning with “submitted (new)”
and either ending with “adopted” or “banked.” Our triage process is built on
the premise of reducing risk, while providing incremental funding, rewards and
recognition as ideas move forward. The ultimate goal is to quickly identify and
adopt high-impact business ideas.
Step 7: Celebrate Successes!
With a rich
history of innovation, Motorola Solutions has long recognized contributions to
our breakthrough solutions, technologies and intellectual property rights (IPR)
portfolio with both monetary and performance-based awards. Our innovation
framework makes global contributions more visible at the individual, facility
and business unit level. This promotes a more innovative and accountable
culture. Several innovators have commented that their greatest reward is having
their idea acknowledged and acted upon.
Pulling it all Together
From
leadership sponsors to employees, it takes engagement from all levels across a
company to make an innovation framework successful. The rewards of seeing ideas
grow to prototypes and, ultimately, to new customer deliverables, keep
innovators looking for what’s next. And when pulled together, these seven steps
create a powerful, collaborative system to ignite innovation at your company.
About the Author:
Heidi
Hattendorf is director of Innovation Development at Motorola Solutions. She
brings more than 20 years of experience in telecoms from public safety and
two-way radio, to consumer mobile phones and network solutions on 3G/4G. She
heads up an Innovation team focused on identifying and creating new
opportunities in adjacent markets and technologies to drive growth. Learn more
about innovation at Motorola Solutions.
- This article
first appeared in Innovation Management
magazine.
