Participation architecture and culture key to Innovation

For the last couple of weeks I have been travelling in South Africa, visiting and talking with customers, and listening. But last week at I listened to a talk given by the Ex CEO of Google South Africa (Stafford Masie), and the core of the talk really resonated with what I have been talking about and seeing.

The key was the you need to open up your cultures and architectures to naturally allow participation in your companies evolution from members within the company and outside. Too often our traditional cultures and systems have closed the strategy, innovation of ideas to evolve companies’ offerings in products/ services to a few. But in the software industry we have developed programs that promote innovation from all corners of a company, Google does this using Friday’s for “my innovation”. Key is the culture to enable innovation and then the framework in the company for promoting ideas and selecting valuable ones to be invested in to be evolved.

Stafford Masie's thoughts took this a step further into general industrial space using examples where companies have opened up their products/ offerings to external groups to provide a different, free thought for evolving the offering, to enable certain break through.

In the past I have spoken about “Operational Innovation”, too often people look at innovation as purely technology, but I believe the greatest return on investment is on “operational innovation” in improving the operational processes and efficiency for producing products and services. Requiring companies to develop a culture and architecture that enables:

• Capturing and understanding current operational processes. Across the industrial assets/ plants making certain products. Providing the opportunity for identification of common best practices, both inefficiencies and efficiencies.
• Promotion of participation across the company from workers, operators and others to contribute operational improvement to processes they work on.
• An architecture and environment where operational processes can be tested, in safe area, so innovation can happen through constructive failure and environment to promote trying. A good example of this is where people can try operational procedures in simulated situations and results captured. Something like an Operator Training System used for both training, and “operational innovation” is valuable environment for safe constructive operational process innovation.
• An environment / architecture that allows ideas to improve to be entered there and then in the system, while the idea is “fresh” and context can be captured, but the idea result in evaluated and feedback to the contributor.

Below is a diagram I have commented on before but shows how companies that embedded process after a lean improvements program far exceed those who just manually implemented process improvement. But the real opportunity for improvement comes when people apply continuous operational innovation (red line). Not being content with their current process but have implemented abilities to understand process performances both machine to machine, people to people, and people to machine. Because they have embedded the operational procedure in the system, over multiple sites, they have everyone acting the same way, so improvement is possible.

Core to success in the next decade is the ability to evolve and innovate, and it is the companies that implement an architecture/ system and culture that promote participation that will be key. What are your plans in seating up a system to enable participation and evolution in a sustained manner?