Tim Brown is an industrial designer by training, and has won numerous design awards.  His team even appeared on a news show, demonstrating how to create a new and improved shopping cart in just 4 days.  His passion is finding ways design can be used to promote the well being of people living in emerging economies. [In fact, many innovative ideas are being created by focusing on these emerging economies].

 He says one of the keys to great ideation is great preparation.  And great preparation begins with a design brief.  Here he captures the power in his own words:

“The difference between a design brief with just the right level of constraint and one that is overly vague or overly restrictive can be the difference between a team on fire with breakthrough ideas and one that delivers a tired reworking of existing ones.”

And I have found this to be true in my work facilitating innovation sessions, though it may seem counter-intuitive.  Often, the clients I work with say they want the brainstorming session to be very broad because they want to “empower” the participants.  In fact the opposite tends to happen.   When the “creativity canvas” is too wide, it actually either leads to too many ideas that are off the mark and not actionable or too many ideas that do not address the most critical challenges. 

As Brown says above, with just the right ending to the sentence – “How might we…” – you too can catch your team on fire with creativty aimed in the right direction!

Now research also shows that employee engagement is a powerful factor in catalyzing “outside-the-box” thinking to improve management and business processes as well as customer service.  This Gallup survey of US workers showed:

• 59% of engaged employees strongly agreed with the statement that their current job “brings out their most creative ideas” – vs only 3% of actively disengaged employees

• Engaged workers are much more likely (6 out of 10) to react positively to creative ideas offered by fellow team members.  Thus, higher levels of employee engagement not only increases the likelihood individual employees will generate new ideas, but also that idea generation among engaged employees can be amplified when it occurs in a team setting. 

What are you doing today to drive employee engagement in your organization?  What if you simply took 20 minutes from your routine staff meeting and used that for brainstorming time?  What tough business challenges is your team facing today that couldn’t be improved by tapping into the creativity of your team members?

Next post…great brainstorming tips and tools!

Hay also conducted supplemental research on employee engagement practices at these organizations, which found that companies at the top of the list generated stronger employee loyalty to the organization over the last two years and reported greater decreases in employee frustrations over work conditions that were not conducive to their success.

“The World’s Most Admired Companies have been particularly good at focusing on long-term strategies, showing little tolerance for executives that compromise long-term objectives for short-term gains,” said Mel Stark, vice president with the Hay Group. “Equally important, the WMAC communicate their objectives to all employees, connecting the goals and objectives of every employee to the overall business strategy, and as a result, were able to come out of the downturn with motivated and loyal employees.”  Hay Group’s study found that 90 percent of respondents from the WMAC identified their company as very effective or effective at fostering high levels of employee engagement compared to 71 percent of their peers.

These findings are supported by another study conducted by consulting firm Towers Perrin (now Towers Watson).  They conducted a Global Workforce Study, the largest study of its kind, in which they asked 90,000 employees in 18 countries,  “What can a company do to attract, retain, and engage top talent?”  They boiled it down to 5 key things:

1. Get leaders out front to talk with employees about the business environment…how the organization is responding…the long-term vision…what the organization stands for.
2. Involve employees in efforts to manage costs to help them feel like active contributors.
3. Communicate consistently and candidly about both short- and long-term objectives.
4. Listen and gather input from employees.
5. Promote development opportunities so people can see a future for themselves worth working toward.

 If you look at 1,3 and 5, you will see these are all about talking to or telling employees something about the company.  2 & 4 are all about listening and getting employees to tell you ways to manage costs, perhaps front line customer feedback on what needs to change, etc.  The researchers noted: “The challenge for senior management is to recognize the value of employees’ untapped potential and to channel it in ways that yield real improvements in business performance.” 

More engagement comes from being recognized as unique and with value.  The good news is with a more engaged team – the leader doesn’t feel they have to do this alone – it truly becomes a team effort.  And they may even come to care as much about the success of the organization as you do.

What do you need to start doing today to attract, retain and engage your top talent?  There’s no time to waste, because even in this tough job market, your highest performers always have choices.

Okay, from the Accenture survey we know execs think innovation is important.  Below is the Daily Stat email I receive from Harvard Business Review (a very valuable resource that I strongly encourage you to check out).  From this Ernst and Young survey, we can see that only half of the senior executives see their companies as more innovative than their competition – and 17% even say their less innovative than peers.   

There are several reasons cited for this.  For example, while many companies are investing more in innovation, only a few have a rigorous approach for managing the process.  As a result even innovative companies often fail to realize the benefits that their new ideas could produce.

Interestingly, almost half of them blame the lack of appropriate personnel as a major contributor to their lack of innovation.  You know as well as I do that you can’t just go getting rid of everyone you don’t think is creative – and in fact you don’t have to.  There are ways – which I will share with you in later blog posts – for discovering and tapping into the creativity in each of us. 

And this is where you come in.  Strategic, progressive leaders have an incredible role to play in boosting the innovation occurring within their companies – and it all begins with employee engagement.   Next post – some proven ideas for how to engage your top talent.

If you look it up in a standard dictionary, like Websters or American Heritage, the definition is simple and straightforward: ”the introduction of something new.”  If, however, you look it up in Business Dictionary.com, you get a very different result: “The process by which an idea or invention is translated into a good or service for which people will pay.  To be called an innovation, an idea must be replicable at an economical cost and must satisfy a specific need.”

The “regular” person’s definition is so much better and more freeing than the business minded one.  I call this the difference between innovation with a little “i” – innovation for everyone – and innovation with a big “I” that stands up to the very tough scrutiny of the business world.   We wonder why we see innovation as a slogan by top execs instead of something that actually gets done.  How do you know if something is going to make money unless you give it a chance?  In many companies we cut new ideas off at the knees because we can’t see right off how it can possibly be profitable.

Let me tell you the story of Alexander Fleming.  It’s 1928 and apparently Dr. Fleming is a pretty messy scientist.  One day he’s cleaning out the petri dishes he had been using to grow bacteria.  Something catches his eye.  Something had contaminated one of the staph cultures – in fact it had killed the bacteria.

Do you know what he had discovered – penicillin — by accident!  “When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer,” Fleming would later say, “But I guess that was exactly what I did.”

A huge success, right?  Wrong!  There were so many difficulties associated with producing penicillin in mass quantities, it would be another 12 years before the world realized what he had created.  We need the broader definition of innovation…so that we can celebrate the learning…not just the end result.

What “discoveries” - no matter how small and seemingly insignificant – have you made recently?  What can you find to celebrate – not just the end result but what you learned from it – and how you can apply those learnings?