five ideas to boost business innovation

Peter Drucker, professor, American business management consultant, author, and theorist As you know, innovating is necessary for the development and sustainability of the company, in a context of ever more rapid and disruptive technological developments.

More and more companies are making their innovation process collaborative. Between-group emulation and different points of view, leaders who adopt this approach have everything to gain. Indeed, involving your employees in improving the company, then called collective improvement, means developing their sense of belonging and uniting them in the company culture; in other words, you involve them sustainably in your project. There's nothing worse than encountering the same frustrations every day or having ideas that no one listens to. So give your teams a voice, and let them express themselves on the improvements they deem useful Today, particularly thanks to digital technology and the methods it promotes, innovating in business has become easier than you might think. Bring innovation into the DNA of your company!

Idea 1: set up discussion groups

Employees meeting regularly to discuss problems encountered daily or reported by customers and finding solutions collectively, that's a good idea For real effectiveness, this discussion group must be brought together regularly (weekly or monthly) and be made up of heterogeneous profiles (various departments and hierarchical levels), ideally representative of the entire company. One of the best practices is also to then share the fruit of the discussions with all the teams, in the form of a written report, an infographic, during an assembly or a department meeting, It's up to you, depending on the preferred means of communication in your company!

To avoid remaining at the theoretical stage and demotivating your teams with endless discussions, you will need to make decisions and define an action plan, also shared with the entire company We have taken here the example of a discussion group brought together to talk about “problems”, but it can just as easily study ways to improve the company, its processes, invent new products and/or services, etc.

Idea 2: organize creativity workshops

Get out the Post-its, colored pens, and whiteboard. Now is the time to get creative To generate ideas (new products or services, new processes, etc.) or solutions, the creativity workshop allows you to obtain relevant results, quickly. This practice is part of the design thinking methodology, a methodology aimed at bringing together a group of people to solve a problem, and design and test a solution Thus, composed in such a way as to represent the entire company (employees at various professions and hierarchical levels), it is held regularly, every week or month.

In more detail, these workshops are based on the end user of the product or service and take place in 3 stages:

• identify a problem,

• find a concept to solve it,

• design a prototype of the imagined response.

For this, many techniques are at your disposal, grouped within the category of serious games (serious games in French). They consist of creating a positive atmosphere conducive to the exchange of ideas, based on the observation that mental barriers are weaker through the game.

Idea 3: open an Innovation center

Like large companies hosting one or more start-ups within them – to promote innovation and produce functional prototypes within a short time frame – you can, on your scale, set up a hub Innovation, also called R&D (Research and Development) center. This permanent center will centralize your innovation efforts. Its activities are diverse, discussion groups and creativity workshops could be set up, offer a prototype design workshop, etc. This center must be the place of all possibilities, a testing zone where all ideas, good or bad, have their place.

Whether transversal to the company or organized into divisions, all services must be represented by at least 2 employees and all levels of hierarchy involved.

Free up time for your employees so that they can devote themselves to this activity and also feel legitimate, grant a few hours per week managed independently, a time slot integrated into the schedule, an arrangement of working hours, etc.

We use the term legitimately to illustrate the fact that some employees do not feel in their place when they work on such missions, a feeling of guilt at not working on their daily tasks, with a cognitive bias towards their colleagues.

Idea 4: involve your customers and/or partners

Who knows better what the customer needs than the customer? Commonly called open innovation, the practice of including customers in the innovation process is increasingly found in business. It is also common to involve partners, depending on your business and the nature of the relationships between you.

Practical case

Empreinte Digitale is the publishing company of the archives software (archives management system deployed in around 80 organizations). We have collected – via our project management software Redmine – throughout the year requests from our customers, both anomalies to be corrected and developments to be developed. For planning and cost reasons, we could not meet their needs on an ongoing basis. We then decided to set up a collective game to involve our customers in choosing the software developments to come for 2019 The aim is to have users vote on the new features of a product, to distinguish those that are truly necessary from those with less added value.

We compiled an exhaustive list of their requests and presented it to them during our annual seminar. After having allocated them several points to distribute between the various functionalities, they had three months to respond, consult with their colleagues, but also possibly communicate between different organizations. At the end of this reflection, we will identify the most requested functionalities, to which we will add our points (a note of the complexity of implementation). Since the game isn't finished yet, we don't know how well it worked. However, for now, we know that our customers have appreciated our approach and are excited to shop the upcoming features of their daily tool! 

Idea 5: Innovate collectively

More and more companies are joining together in networks to pool their skills and develop their activities. We see many players in the same sector, in the same sector, sometimes competitors, coming together in clusters. The collective dimension then allows each actor in the sector to express themselves on their needs, problems, fears, and desires, the aim being to optimize practices and work better together, in the interest of all.

This is where collective innovation comes into play. The coordination of different actors ensures efficiency and productivity gains, thanks to in-depth knowledge of the professions. Furthermore, to innovate, the company may require additional skills, which only partners will be able to provide.