Progressing in Stages

The whole company is involved in experimenting with new ideas and improving processes, in sharing knowledge and creating the complete learning organization. 

Involvement in workplace innovation develops in five stages.  You can use this model to identify the stage your organization has reached, and what needs to be done to progress toward higher involvement.

• Level One - Innovation is random and occasional.  People do help to solve problems, but here is no attempt to build on this, and organizations may actively restrict the opportunities for innovation to take place.
• Level Two - An organization attempts to mobilize involvement.  This needs a formal process for finding and solving problems in a structured and systematic way, and training employees to use it.
• Level Three - High-involvement capability is coupled with the strategic goals of the organization, so that improvement activities of teams and individuals can be aligned.  Strategy deployment, and monitoring and measuring are required for this.
• Level Four - High involvement produces profit.  Individuals and groups need to be empowered to innovate on their own initiative.  This requires an understand of, and commitment to, overall strategic objectives.
• Level Five - The whole company is involved in experimenting with new ideas and improving processes, in sharing knowledge and creating the complete learning organization. 

ACTION POINT: Determine the level of innovation that exists in your organization and work toward creating the complete learning organization.

High-Involvment Innovation

any change by which work is rendered superior in quality or more economical in cost."  

High-involvment innovation has been around for a while.  Denny's Shipyard in Dumbarton, Scotland, back in 1871 asked--and rewarded--workers for "any change by which work is rendered superior in quality or more economical in cost."  

It makes a big difference to firms like Toyota that do this on a systematic basis-it receives around two million suggestions a year from its workforce.  Kawasaki engineering, another high-involvment player, has a staggering seven million)--and it implements the majority of these.

ACTION POINT:  Encourage your employees to look for any change that renders superior quality work or more economical cost.

Involving over the Long Term

to change the way people think and behave on a long-term basis requires a strategic development program. 

Once you have started the innovation process, the difficulty lies in keeping it going long enough to make a real difference.  Many organizations start the process, have an initial surge of ideas and enthusiasm, and then see it gradually ebb away until there is little or no continuous improvement (CI) activity.

This isn't surprising--to change the way people think and behave on a long-term basis requires a strategic development program.

ACTION POINT:  One of the most powerful agents for change in organizations is mobilizing the efforts of  employees to deliver a steady stream of continuous improvement. 

Involving Employees

every pair of hands there comes a free brain.

Creativity comes as standard equipment with everyone who works in your organization.  To paraphrase one manager, with every pair of hands there comes a free brain.  The challenge lies in engaging this creativity--or how to tap into this resource to keep making innovation happen.

An organization can choose to involve all employees in innovation (high involvement) or only a few (low involvement).  The extent of involvement depends in part on whether the planned innovations are radical (high impact) or incremental (low impact).  Either way, employees must feel motivated, empowered, and enabled to contribute if they are to help in innovation.

ACTION POINT: Engage the creativity of your employees through motivation, empowerment and allowing them to contribute.

Forty Eleven -1 or 4011-1?

DD is going off line and will no longer be available.

For those of you that have suffered through the last 6 1/4 years of the DD you will be happy to hear that the pain is over. Today will be the last post you will have to endure. That's right DD is going off line and will no longer be available.

For any topics or posts that you found interesting, you can click on their title before midnight tonight and then either print the post or cut and paste into word for you own personal records. You can burn them later at your leisure.

So with that being said DD, aka Geschaft Taglich (German for more Hefewiezen beer please) bids you auf wiedersehen.

ACTION POINT: Just Kidding April Fools, 2o11. Auf Wiedersehen means on again seeing, which will be on Monday. :)

PS - Geschaft Taglich does not mean more beer, it is deutsch for Business Daily. Have a good weekend.