Making Your Organization Innovative

What if your organisation is not innovative? And on top of it even has innovation barriers. We have talked a lot about how to innovate, but let’s face it, some organisations have a harder time than others. Maybe you work at a bigger company with a lot of bureaucracy to sort through. Or maybe there is a culture of safety and routine rather than experimentation and innovation. Even for those cases, there are small steps that help organisations be more innovative; for example, getting the chance to host an innovation challenge. But how can you guarantee a successful event with the pressure to prove the merits of innovation? Context Partners, a social innovation design firm, has written a useful guide in making your organisation innovative. Read the guide here or keep reading this article for a short summary!

Step 1. Define the challenge

What problem or challenge are you trying to solve? Identify the core themes surrounding your initiative. Then, decide which questions you would like answered and who can best answer them. The goal is to come up with one specific challenge statement or question. Once you have come up with a few that define your challenge, ask yourself how you could make each question more specific. The more specific the question, the more creative the answers will be.

Step 2. Design

Make a plan or an outline for your innovation process. Context Partners names the three P’s for this stage: Product, Process, and People. Ask yourself the following questions:

1. What type of ideas would be most helpful? Software solutions? New organisational structures? Do not get too specific with this as you want to see how participants can open your organisation to new ways of thinking
2. What resources do you have? How much funding do you have to put into a new project?
3. What space do you have? What software will you be using?
4. What is your timeline for the project?
5. Which community(ies) could make your organisation more innovative? Professionals? Non-professionals? Coders? Social entrepreneurs? Brainstorm a big list of communities that could be helpful to you, and be as specific as possible. These are the communities you will seek participants from.

These questions will all define step 3, implementation, so make sure you are satisfied with the answers to these questions.

Step 3. Implement

There are a number of different ways your innovation challenge can play out. We have spoken before about Hackathons and Idea Competitions, which are both great ways to make big changes. However, these types of competition can take a lot of time and resources. If your organisation is still reluctant to dedicate resources to innovation, it is time to get creative. Twitter chats and Google hangouts are a great place to start. You have access to a large audience and all it takes is a bit of time planning and promoting.

The type of design you choose for your event depends on the nature of your challenge and the goals of your challenge.

Step 4. Learn

Your challenge does not end once your event is over. Now that you have collected all the information it is time to learn with it and take any necessary next steps. We have written about how to measure innovation, but the way you measure and analyse data will depend on the type of challenge you held in step 3. Remember that not all data is quantitative. Qualitative data can be just as, if not more, helpful in certain cases. If you have hosted a twitter chat or collected people’s stories, you may be measuring your results differently than if you hosted an idea contest or hackathon.

As you can see it does not need huge resources to be a more innovative organisation. What matters is to start somehow. We hope these 4 steps will help you take the plunge with your organisation!