CHAPTER 7

Infectious Innovation Process (Putting it all Together)

Infectious Innovation is a method of transforming employee ideas into dramatic revenue growth. Employee ideas may be generated, collected, and filtered so that the optimum ideas are selected and turned into new products and services that have a dramatic impact on top-line revenues.

Senior management often tells the public that their people are the most important resource. To get the most out of this resource, employees should be encouraged to contribute to revenues by generating and submitting ideas to help the company innovate in the best possible way.

There are so many innovations entering the marketplace all the time that it’s impossible for senior management to keep track of them all and to determine how these innovations may help their business move forward. It’s important to allow as many people to contribute as possible so that the organization has as many ideas as possible to choose from. This allows more contributions on how the many other new innovations may impact the organization’s fortunes.

Innovations do not stay ahead of the competition for very long these days. When Amazon introduced and gained traction with the Alexa home device, Google was quick to come out with its own version, named Google Home. When AMC came out with a successful show on zombies, named The Walking Dead, other cable channels and streaming services looked at how they could entertain clients with postapocalyptic series.

Each organization is different, despite the seeming convergence in the marketplace. They all have different strategies, but all successful organizations have the same strategy in common: growth. The best way to do this is innovation, and the best way to innovate is by incorporating the Infectious Innovation Process.

The previous chapters in this book have served to explain the various stages of the Infectious Innovation Process. This chapter details the tools and techniques that can be used to monitor and improve the success rate of Infectious Innovation.

Process Visual

Through the previous five chapters, the reader has been taken through the five stages of the Infectious Innovation Process: idea generation, idea collection, idea filtering, idea escalation, and pilots. A visual form of the process has been shown in each chapter, and it is now complete as follows:

Chapter 2, “Idea Generation,” provides several techniques to indicate how individuals can use their creativity to come up with innovative ideas to help their organization move forward. The chapter ends with how individuals can expand their ideas by connecting with others in the organization.

Chapter 3, “Idea Collection,” describes how organizations today are collecting ideas on innovation from their employees, be it through suggestion boxes, brainstorming sessions, innovation contests, or hackathons.

The third phase of the Infectious Innovation Process is the idea triage stage. This is described in detail in Chapter 4, “Filtering Ideas,” where several methods are discussed on how senior management or the innovation committee can go through a number of submissions and decide which ones are most worth pursuing. The chapter then outlines some rating scales that an organization may use to speed up the process, while measuring against the criteria they deem important. The chapter concludes with a discussion of business strategy and how it can be used to properly triage the ideas as necessary.

The fourth phase of the process, idea escalation, is discussed in Chapter 5, “Escalating Ideas.” There are many reasons given why it’s imperative that someone in senior management be involved, particularly if it’s a large project that will involve many departments in the organization. The components of a business case are then discussed to show how the various options may be detailed and then considered when moving forward. The chapter continues with the important aspects of selecting a team to diagnose and evaluate the various options and concludes with various financial and technical issues that need to be considered.

The fifth and final phase of the Infectious Innovation Process is the pilot stage, discussed in Chapter 6, “Pilots.” The chapter specifies several criteria to take into account when a pilot is being considered. These include the client base segment, physical location, size of the pilot, length of time to run the pilot, and investment in the pilot. The chapter then outlines the timing of the pilot, who’s involved in the pilot, and how to judge the success of the pilot.

That, in a nutshell, is the Infectious Innovation Process. It can be used to create new products and/or new services to help revenues grow. It can be used to create new business processes to help costs decrease. It is a systematic approach to help organizations make innovation more predictable, while optimizing the success of new ideas.

One of the most common questions is how long this process takes. There are many factors that could affect the length of time it takes. When clients are running innovation contests, there is usually a month-long intake process to allow for the submission of ideas. As organizations get more experience going through the various levels of the process, they get more adept, and the time frame decreases for the idea triage, escalation, and pilot phases.

To teach organizations how to run the process, one-day and five-day workshops are available. The five-day workshop is the preferred choice, as several hours are spent on each phase of the Infectious Innovation Process. Participants generate ideas through a brainstorming session, filter ideas, escalate to senior management, and then decide on details of the pilot. The one-day workshop is an accelerated version where each phase is practiced through the course of a day.

Benefits

As stated in the opening chapter of this book, there is an ever-growing desire for businesses to grow. Investors are looking for organizations that are growing. Employees are looking for growing organizations. Shareholders are looking for the organizations they currently invest in to continue to grow. Many large businesses have already become global and exhausted all the possible markets and sales channels. So the best way to grow is to innovate!

The best way to innovate is to have as many ideas as possible entering a process where the ideas can be quickly filtered, escalated, and turned into pilots.

In addition to being a process that gives an organization many ideas on how to create new products and services, the Infectious Innovation Process can also help organizations to create new business processes to make the organization more cost effective. Workflows can be sped up, while resource needs may be optimized.

There are both tangible and intangible benefits of implementing the Infectious Innovation Process. A key tangible benefit is increased revenues from innovative new products, new services, or new customer relationships. Another tangible benefit may be reduced costs as new processes are introduced. In either case, there is an increased profit for the organization.

Intangible benefits include employee engagement with the growth of the company. As employees see ideas turn into new products, new services, and new processes, they grow more accepting of the process and more trusting of its ability to deliver.

Infectious Innovation Index

Every company claims to be innovative, especially to shareholders. But how innovative is a company? After working with dozens of organizations in multiple industries over the years, I have created a tool to determine how innovative a company is. It will allow a company to gauge its current level, as well as provide a yardstick for future growth on the innovation scale.

This tool is labeled the Infectious Innovation Index. It includes several indicators that show how innovative a company really is. Take the following test, and see how your company rates. As you go through the process, check after every iteration of the process to see how your score is increasing.

The Infectious Innovation Index: Perfect Score is 100

Answer each question, and then add up the scores of all ten questions. This sum is the value of the Infectious Innovation Index for your organization. The perfect score is 100.

A range of scores is as follows:

Feedback Mechanism

An index can help you gauge how the organization is doing at a specific time. A check of how your organization is doing on the index is important to do on an annual basis to ensure that you are adhering to your own high standards.

Innovation Dashboard

There is also a need to have a dashboard to provide more frequent feedback.

The Infectious Innovation Dashboard will give an organization a real-time or near real-time indication how innovation is progressing in the organization. (Several of my clients deem reporting mechanisms that report up to the previous day as real time. Freezing results at midnight gives more comparable results over time, since the variations that occur through the day are ignored.)

The dashboard needs to capture the success of each stage of the process. It measures the success by having a few targets for each stage. Specifically, each stage needs to have an optimum target, and a minimum target. For example, the idea generation stage may have a minimum monthly goal of 500 ideas, while its optimum monthly goal may be 1,500 ideas. In this case, there would be a gauge on the dashboard for ideas generated. If the number of ideas generated in the previous month is less than the minimum, the gauge would be red. If the number of ideas generated in the previous month is greater than the minimum target, but less than the optimum target, the gauge would be yellow. If the number of ideas generated in the previous month is greater than or equal to the optimum target, the gauge would be green.

The goal for all the gauges is always the green area, or the optimum range. The red area is to be avoided, while the yellow area shows room for improvement.

The dashboard should have five gauges, one for each stage of the process: Idea Generation, Idea Collection, Idea Triage, Idea Escalation, Pilot. There is typically a sliding scale for the number of ideas as the stages progress. That is, the minimum and optimum numbers for the idea generation stage should be higher than the minimum and optimum numbers for the idea collection stage.

The entry and exit levels need to be monitored, in order to ensure maximum impact of the Infectious Innovation Process. How many generated ideas are being collected? How many collected ideas make it past the triage stage? How many triaged ideas are escalated? How many escalated ideas make it to pilot? What is the success rate of the pilot trials?

The frequency of measurement would depend on a number of variables. If an organization is running an annual innovation contest, then they would need less frequent measurement of ideas being generated than an organization that is continually looking for new employee ideas. Similarly, if an organization is triaging ideas once a quarter, then a weekly check of how many ideas are being generated would be overkill. The frequency of measurement would also depend on the frequency of meetings to discuss the innovation process.

The frequency of measurement may also depend on previous success rates of the Infectious Innovation Process within the organization. If there have been issues, and efforts have been made to improve the success of the process, then more frequent measurements may be in order.

Early in my career, I worked with a firm that manufactured telecommunication equipment. We had a responsibility to determine if incoming parts met our quality standards. A military sampling method was used. If there were no known issues with the product, then 5 percent of the components would be tested against quality standards. If any components failed the quality standards, then the number of components to be tested would be increased to 10 percent. If components continued to fail, the testing rate would increase to 20 percent, and so on. If the 20-percent mark was yielding no failures, then the testing rate would be decreased to 10 percent.

A similar system should be used with the Infectious Innovation Process. Less frequent monitoring is needed when the process is yielding results that meet or exceed expectations, while more frequent monitoring is needed when the process is yielding less than expected results.

The dashboard can be visual, by showing gauges that indicate if the output of each stage is above the optimum level, between the optimum and minimum level, or below the minimum level. Or the dashboard can be textual and merely show numbers. Most of my clients have used dashboards that combine visual and textual information to accommodate the varying needs of senior managers. The important aspect of the dashboard is that it allows senior management the ability to determine if the Infectious Innovation Process is running smoothly. When issues arise, the feedback can be delivered to the areas involved.

Figure 7.1 Sample funnel dashboard

Figure 7.1 shows a funnel-type dashboard that combines the various stages of the Infectious Innovation Process. It shows both the textual and visual components of the process to accommodate senior managers who may have a preference for one or the other.

Bar charts are more popular when monthly comparisons need to be done. See Figure 7.2 below for an example. Reporting software has become so advanced that there are a multitude of possibilities.

For organizations that are committed to having a culture of innovation, these measurements can be rolled up into one measurement that can be relayed to the C-suite for consideration in their dashboard.

Length of Process

The Infectious Innovation Process is different in every organization. With the various collection mechanisms, rating schemes in the triage phase, business case templates in the escalation phase, and pilot sizes, no two implementations of the process are the same.

Figure 7.2 Sample bar chart dashboard

It is possible to go through the whole process in one day. Our company offers a one-day workshop, which is typically used as a trial run for the organization, but may meet all the demands if the idea generation has been done ahead of time.

A one-day workshop may also be used to address a specific problem. For example, if a client organization wants to come up with a new product to enter a certain market segment, then a one-day workshop can be held to address new products or services for that specific segment. To achieve maximum success, it is important to have a number of key personnel from sales and marketing, operations, and finance to ensure that all angles can be covered in the shortest amount of time.

A one-week workshop is more common for organizations that want to run through the process in a short period of time. This allows a day for each stage of the process, while allowing the mind to relax between each stage. As with the one-day workshop, representation from across the organization is ideal to ensure maximum success.

For organizations that want to adopt this process as part of their normal workload, the recommended time frame is three months, or one fiscal quarter. This allows for the ideas to be generated and then collected over the first four weeks of the quarter. The ideas can then be triaged over the next three weeks. The escalation phase will last for three weeks. This leaves two weeks to prepare for the pilot. The pilot then may take any amount of time, while the process starts again at the beginning of the next quarter.

Organizations that hold innovation contests or innovation brainstorming sessions typically run the contests or sessions on an annual basis. In this case, the triage and escalation phases will normally take six weeks to complete after the session or contest ends. The pilot phase will then take some time to prepare and execute.

Hackathons tend to be run on an ad hoc basis, but I have spoken with some organizations that are more proactive and schedule one per quarter. The length of time for the process to run under these conditions would depend on the frequency of the hackathons, and the outcome of the hackathon.

Getting Started

Start today! In this day and age, there is no reason to wait to grow. Investors, employees, and shareholders are looking for growth, so give it to them.

The question is never when to start, but usually how or where to start. Should your organization set up a suggestion box? Or is an innovation contest or hackathon better?

Some people are eager to be the first to try things, while others want to wait to see if the initiative has legs or is just a passing phase in the organization.

One of my clients was a telecommunications giant, and the manufacturing team was moving from Florida to Mexico. The product I was working with for the client was set to be the first one on the new manufacturing line in Mexico. The management team was not happy that their product was the first to be manufactured in the new plant in Mexico. There were unknowns in the new site, and kinks to be worked out. But one product had to be first!

The Infectious Innovation Process has the potential to dramatically improve an organization’s revenues by selecting the best employee ideas and turning them into new products and services. The question I’m often asked is how to get started. The steps to follow are outlined below.

Getting started is sometimes the hardest part. In my Fast Company interview with Isadore Sharp, I asked Mr. Sharp what advice he had for today’s entrepreneurs, and he had the following to say:

I wish all the readers the best of luck as they explore the many opportunities that are out there, as they adopt Infectious Innovation in their organization!

Visit my website www.infectiousinnovation.com to get updates, and send me your success stories at [email protected].

Summary

Infectious Innovation Process

Benefits

Getting Started

Infectious Innovation Index

Feedback Mechanism