Innovation Quotient

"Is there any quick way to check the innovation quotient of my organisation?" This was the question posed to me by a recent acquaintance of mine, whose firm had expanded quite a bit recently, and was looking to enter the big league. Hmm...Interesting question!!!

"As an example", he continued, "SEI-CMM or ISO is a measure of the quality processes in the organisation. The revenue and the Profit and Loss financial statements are a good measure of the health of the organisation. Surely we can devise some way to check the innovation culture in a similar fashion".

That set me thinking. Yes - we can look at the spend on R&D by the company or the amount of money got from new products introduced but that will need a fair amount of digging and you can never be sure of its accuracy. But is there any other quick or definitive measure?

Here are my thoughts:

The easiest and the best measure of the innovation culture of an organisation can be guaged by the reaction to these couple of situations:

1. How are failures treated by the organisation when the failures are due to trying out different or new ways of doing things?


2. How many top leaders and role models of the organisation believe in innovation and encourage people to try out new ideas and how much of freedom do they give to these initiatives?

Let us look at these points in more detail and I will explain my thinking.

The first point shows the creative spirit of the organisation and how open they are to trying out new and different things. You may think it is straight forward and simple to implement but try enforcing this to your middle management layers. The middle management staff are most concerned about productivity and effectiveness and frankly will not be very receptive to your ideas about improving the innovation culture. Now is that bad? Not really since really the immediate results are thanks to these staff and their measures. But the side effect of this is that people are equated to machines and told to just follow a process and not think differently. Also you only need to criticise a few failures and you will find that people are more than happy to go into their shell and follow the safe path. Ideally we need a mix of the two. A set of resources (ideally senior staff with enough experience and those who understand customer needs) should be given the charter to think of new ways and actively encouraged to fail and try different ideas. In the long run, some of these will surely be successful and that will make all the failures worthwhile for the organisation.

The second point is more about setting an example to the majority staff who will be junior. Not all managers and leaders realise it but they have tremendous power and influence over the junior staff in the organisation. They should be aware of this and need to use it effectively. As an example, if the top management staff in the organisation spend as little as 1 hour in a week meeting different teams and enforcing the message of innovation and openness, it will go a long way in encouraging staff to trying out different things and motivating them to break the shackles and think differently. Another equally important point is about freedom and the power to change. It is not enough if employees are asked to think new ideas and differently, equally important is the resources and freedom to implement a few of their ideas which they think is worthwhile. Again if the top leaders of the organisation encourage this, they can be assured that soon it will spread and everybody will be trying different and new things. Agreed that not all of them will be successful and there may be some resources and money wasted, but I am sure the few items which do become successful will pay for all the bad failures.

So leaders - what do you think? Do you have the courage to introspect and ask these bold questions? More importantly are you bold enough to take some corrective action or do you want to take the easier path and blame the lack of innovative ideas on your resources?

Can you think of more measures? Happy to get your thoughts and ideas on this topic.