rolling out an innovation culture

7/27/2019 Rolling Out an Innovation Culture

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ROLLING OUT AN INNOVATION CULTURE

-- By Porus Munshi

Innovation Culture - the underpinnings

At its heart, creating a culture is about Ignition. And Ignition is triggered by stories of'PeopleLike Us'.

What's common between British Table Tennis, BBC, Spartak, St.Patrick's School in Kenya's rift

valley and Save The Children of Vietnam? They are all examples of a key insight: Tremendoustransformations and change and performance happen in people, organizations and countries

through stories of'People Like Us'.

Till the BBC came in, we believed that Indians could never compete in contact sports at a globallevel. We Indians dont have the endurance, we dont have the right kind of muscle fibre, we

dont have the right mindset, we dont have the genes and so on. Then the BBC came in. And

BBC here is the Bhiwani Boxing Club. A small boxing club in a small town in Haryana that hascreated Indias boxing heroes who are now recognized as contenders at the world level.

Once a few of the BBCs initial students went on to win at international levels, it ignited a wholegeneration of youngsters who watched people like usbeing able to break onto the world stage.

Akhil Kumar, Vijender Singh became heroes and triggered an almost mass movement into

boxing. And all of a sudden the very logical sounding gene based explanations about why Indians

couldnt box have fallen by the wayside.

Spartak Tennis Academy of Moscow produced Anna Kournikova who won the Wimbledon in

1998. This set off a tremendous floodgate of young Moscow girls flocking to become the nextAnna Kournikova. Many of them had seen her play, many knew her, many had played with her

and they knew her to be just an ordinary girlnot even the best at the academy. And if she

could do it, so could they. In less than a decade after that Wimbledon victory, Spartak was

producing dozens of little girls grunting like Anna Kournikova. And at a point in time 5 of thetop 10 women and 7 of the top 20 women players in the world were from Moscow, specifically

from the small Spartak tennis academy. The entire US at the time produced only 3 of the top 20

players.

Through much of the 1980's almost all of Britain's top table tennis talent came from a single

street in the small town of Reading in England. That single street produced more top table tennis

players than all of Britain combined. Again a story of Ignition and 'people like us'. After a singleperson from that street went on to become a national champion, tremendous Ignition took place

amongst the neighborhood kids.

The famous and invincible middle and long distance runners of Kenya largely come from one

part of Kenya - the Rift Valley, and specifically the town of Iten and even more specifically from

St.Patrick's school there. And it all began in 1976 when an Irish clergyman, Brother Colm


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O'Connell went over there to teach in that school and began to encourage and train students for

long distance running.

If you notice, these are all extremely localized: one town, one street, one institute, one valley, one

school. Sports performance isn't about genetics, it's about a culture that has to come in. Similarly

breakthrough innovation isn't about talent. It's about a culture that has to come in.

In innovation, when teams see one team in the organization create a breakthrough, it produces

ignition. Bosch India experienced this when they created a breakthrough for diesel engines, Titan

Watches experienced this when they create the worlds slimmest water-resistant watch.

Ignition works best when we believe it is People like us who are doing it. As long as we believe

that those who make breakthroughs are not people like us, we dont make breakthroughs happen

and instead rationalize about talent or MNC culture or environment or resources. So a key step tosteering change, transformation or innovation in organizations is to constantly share stories of

People Like Us: Ordinary people from within the organization or industry or geography who

have done the extraordinary.

And that's the key to any cultural transformation. Bob Stone who was largely responsible for the

amazing turnaround of government efficiency in the US during the Clinton-Gore years, says that

it all boils down to one thing: "Find and publicly reward people who are doing what you want,And tell stories about them everywhere you go."

Obviously to create Ignition and be able to have 'People Like Us' stories to share, potentialsuccesses have to be nurtured and enabled till they become lighthouses. That brings us to the next

part: How to create the enabling environment that allows for innovation to blossom in the

organization?

The Process of Creating an Innovation Culture - Fission and not Big Bang

A large part of culture is about ones relationship with ones boss. The first challenge is to changethe dynamic and build trust. And one of the most rapid ways of changing the dynamic is for the

leader to actively seek out and solve irritants his peers face and to genuinely listen to and make

commitments to his subordinates that are within his power to make and to keep them. One leaderhad a whiteboard outside his office asking 'How am I doing?' Anybody could go up and write

anonymously on the board whatever he felt the leader was doing well or poorly. Another would

actively go to subordinates once a month and ask what he (the leader) was doing that was

preventing the subordinate from being Generative. A third would ask people what irritants theyhad and solve as many as he could. All these in their own way changed the culture and the

dynamic of the team. And once the dynamic changed and moved towards trust, the team could

pretty much do anything.


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An Indicative Sequence to Create a Culture of Innovation at both the organizational and the

department level

Note: Innovation happens at 2 levels: Targeted innovation missions that the larger organization

sponsors and leads, and bottom-up innovation projects that departments anchor.

1. Change the dynamic between the leader and the team to move it towards trust.2. Create innovation awareness sessions in the teamwhy innovation? Why is innovation

an imperative? What are the larger consequences of not innovating? How innovationbenefits the individual as well as the organization. The intent is to raise awareness, create

urgency and highlight the personal and team benefits of innovating.

3. In each department identify 5-6 people ready and keen to take up an innovation journey -the lead radicals. The lead radicals are willing and keen experimenters who want to trysomething new and make a difference. They are the pioneers and once they are successful

they create a fission with many more keen to replicate their successes. A majority of

people are often proof seekers and are quite willing to do something as long as someonehas demonstrated that it can be done and that they benefit from it. They get ignited by

'people like us' stories. And it is often from these beginnings that fission happens. It's

happened that way in a number of organizations like Trichy Police, the Surat

transformation, Max New York Life, Tanishq and even the US government to name afew. Mandates don't create an innovation culture, fission does.

4. Train the lead radicals on innovation tools and techniques and the Process of innovation.The process is key because, in addition to creating skills and techniques, people like toknow that something can be replicated on demand and that they can do it too. And this

more than anything creates fission.

5. Allow the team identified in each department to choose out of projects created by thedepartment or allow them to co-create projects based on Departmental challenges.

6. Define clearly the free time they will have available to work on the projects. Highlight theimportance and imperative of the project to the department and to the organization.

7. Choose an innovation champion along with the team. Teams often choose a 'safe' or'compromise' person especially if there are two or more strong personalities in the team.

Enable them to go beyond a 'don't rock the boat' champion to someone who is willing to

stretch and push and yet is good with people. Someone who's purpose driven, doesn'tsettle at the Lowest Common Denominator and is good at inspiring, prodding, and

enabling people. Someone who's also not particularly deferential to senior management

and is willing to push back for what he and the team believe in when it comes to the

project. The champion is chosen not on designation but according to characteristics.8. The team will need regular mentoring by a mentor anchored high in the department.

Further, they will need a sponsor anchored high in the organization who has a bird's eye

view of where they can get further inputs/resources/ideas from other parts of the

organization when they run into obstacles.9. Set up a definite review process and frequency of review anchored to the innovation

process.

10.Mentor and sponsor being present and on time at all reviews sends a very clear signalabout the imperative of the project. The first projects per se may not be something critical


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to the organization and hence the temptation may be to skip or reschedule some reviews

because something 'important' comes up. But the reviews are not so much for the project

alone as much as for creating a culture of innovation because nothing sends as clear amessage about the importance of the new 'new way' as senior management making time

always to be present for the reviews. It also creates a trigger in others to be involved in

innovation projects themselves because they see that this creates access to topmanagement at a far more one-on-one and focused level. The organization would need tocreate a consensus for senior management that in case of conflicting priorities, it's reviews

first and everything else next. For senior management, this is the 'Walk the Talk' stage of

creating a culture.11.Celebrate successes. Visibilize and make the team heroes. Take a leaf out of the army

from the way they create champions and heroes. Commemorate failures too as learning

experiences because in the journey people have learnt something. This is also to remove

the fear of failure. The US army has the Purple Heart award for those wounded in the lineof duty. Create a 'purple heart' for daring to try. The Tata group has a 'Dare to Try' section

in its annual Innovista awards for the best innovations in the group. The 'Dare to Try'

award is given to teams who did everything right but factors completely out of theircontrol limited their success.

12.Create "Greenballs" successful project members who speak to others and becomeevangelists for innovation. Greenballs should be across different levels because they

influence their own levels the maximum. People listen to 'People Like Us' at hierarchicallevels too.

13.Principles to follow:- Initially focus on process more than results. Adherence to the innovation process

will create replicable innovations rather than the work of a solitary 'genius'.

Replicability builds culture.

- Celebrate failures as learning experiences to de-risk and remove fear of failure.- Create coaching, guiding and mentoring structures.- Demonstrate Innovation as a priority in the organization.

14.Once success happens and the projects are closed, repeat the above steps at a larger scale:larger project scope, larger teams, and larger impact.

15.Expand into creating an innovation school that has a 3-4 month of innovation curriculumand where students take on projects from a list available or create their own projects.

Innovation Process at a Department/Project Level

1. Department head announces themes or challenges that need to be solved or projects that have

been conceptualized.2. Invites/calls for projects to solve the challenges or address the themes.

3. Chooses projects according to strict, transparent criteria: This can be 2X2 matrices of the

following form (in sequence):

High Impact - High Uniqueness, High Impact - Lowest Resources required, High Impact -Highest Ease of Implementation.

4. Department head mentors projects through the innovation process. Co-mentoring can also

happen by "Greenballs" - people who have successfully led other innovation projects.5. R&R happens to the team, not to individuals.


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6. The organizational challenge is to pull out all the stops to create the first 3-4 successes in each

department. And then use these successes to bring in many more and also to gradually increase

scale of impact as well as reduce resources.

About Themes and Challenges

The organization sets annual themes that align the entire organization to the key strategic andinnovation-area focus for the year. Key innovation projects are invited for these themes. For

instance, one organization was looking at a 5-fold increase in revenue in 5 years. Lead

influencers in the organization were invited to an alignment offsite and the reflection thatemerged was that this could be done by adding more people along with adding capacity. But this

would only be done if everyone at the offsite agreed that they already had the best processes and

best equipment in place and that nothing more could possibly be done, that there was absolutely

no scope for improvement. The influencers were also told about market uncertainties and risks ofadding manpower and capital costs. Could a 5-fold increase occur without this? The team began

to reflect on what processes could be simplified and automated systematically. And that became

the theme for the year: Simplify and Automate. Different groups were formed to redesign capitaland manpower intensive processes. The impact was that 10 breakthrough projects emerged, and

the overall impact is that not only has 5-fold growth been achieved by existing manpower and

equipment, the teams also created new-to-the-world machinery that have the potential to be sold

on the global market. One process for instance currently comprising 456 people was completelyredesigned so that even with a 5-fold increase, it could be done by just 47 people. The rest were

re-assigned within the organization.

Examples of initial themes could be:

1. 'What's New': For every department to emerge with 3 new ways of doing their work every

month.

2. HOD fund: An fixed amount between 1-3 lakhs given to every HOD upfront to create and runinnovation missions up to the prototype stage. The initial amount is given no questions asked and

later investments in the missions can be made through a review mechanism. Many HODs often

complain of lack of funds and this is a way to overcome this by giving funds up front with noexplanatory note or approval required. This isn't an invitation to take the funds - it's an

expectation and a requirement. Interestingly, once this is put in place, many HODs then have to

be pushed hard to take the fund. But once they do, interesting results emerge.3. A theme that an organization used was 'Leap for Lasting Leadership' where Bob Beamon's 20

year Olympic long jump record was the inspiration. The intent was to create innovations that

would last 20 years and propel the organization into creating World Records in productivity,

marketing, supply chain, sales et al.

Targeted Challenges

These are challenges created by both the larger organization at the CEO office or strategy level aswell by departments/SBUs. The intent for both is game-changing innovation. Some areas may

fall between department gaps and it makes sense for the top leadership to identify and champion

such challenges and the projects emanating from them.


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For departments, the intent is create game changing innovation that impacts not just the

department but also the organization and the industry. Every department in every organization

has the potential to disrupt its industry.

Innovation Triggers

In addition to Themes and Challenges, a number of innovation triggers can be used. Someexamples are:

1. The X-Prize kind of trigger where any department/group of individuals pursues achallenge created by the organization. It's a very specific challenge with definedconstraints and outcomes. A funding mechanism can be worked out depending on the

criticality and technical requirements of the project. The teams pursue the challenge and

the first team to meet the conditions and deliver a working prototype with a scale up plan

wins a KBC kind of mega prize in the vicinity of Rs.1 crore. Obviously the benefit to theorganization has to be of a comparable magnitude.

2. The Rapid Follower Prize. Many innovations in departments don't get scaled up becauseemployees don't use the innovation or resist it. This prize, in addition to the award alreadygiven to the innovator is given to the first 2-3 followers who take the initiative to use the

innovation in daily work or who champion the innovation and add to it. This creates the

conditions for rapid scale up of innovations.

3. The 'identify and replicate bright spots' prize. Not directly related to innovation butnonetheless a key area for organizational impact and in developing a culture of seeking

and replicating high performance. The prize is given to individuals who find out what

someone else in their department/area is doing very well and why he/she is gettingextraordinary results. And then replicate that in their own work to get similar or better

results. This isn't about being a fast follower for an innovation and instead is about

individuals seeking excellence and replicating it and building on it to get similar or

greater results. In the bargain both get recognized - the earlier invisible person who hasbeen getting unusual results and the person who's cracked this person's performance code

and replicated those results for himself.

For instance at Vietnam, malnutrition in children was endemic until Jerry Sternin arrived

on the scene. He began by searching out in every village, the bright spots: examples of

people who though verypoor had children who werent malnourished and got others fromthe village to speak to these folk about what they were doing differently. And when

villagers learnt from their own neighbors what they were doing, they began doing it

themselves. In less than 6 years, moving from village to village, malnutrition was

eradicated using no additional infusion of funds. Villagers were ignited by people like usdoing it. If someone externally had come in and said that they should do the very same

things they would probably have been ignored. When you see people like us do

remarkable things, it breaks many of the rationalizations that would otherwise arise like

their conditions are different, it wont work with our people, in this industryin thiscountry/state/city. And so on.

Rewards and Recognition for innovators


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The initial R&R has to be very specific because we want to create a belief that innovation is a

matter of process rather than a hit-or-miss effort. In that regard, the following are some principlesfor R&R:

1. R&R happens to the entire team rather than to the individual2.

The first key award is for following the process of innovation end to end irrespective offinal outcome.

3. The second key award is the successful outcome of the project.4. The third key award is on how well teams have followed metrics:

a. Number of ideas generated for the challenge using thinking toolsb. Process of insight mining followedc. Enrolling of people - stakeholders and peers - how effectived. Use of the 2X2 matrices mentioned earlier for selection of projects based on

objective criteriae. quality of prototypes createdf. EVERY team gets rewarded for undergoing the journey. The ones with 100%

compliance to process get a special mention.5. R&R: Can take the form of cash awards, of specially crafted certificates of appreciationthat look as formal and well crafted as degrees and diplomas, and most powerfully, photo

sessions with the MD. For many the last is the most appreciated and memorable and that

photo along with the certificate hangs on many sitting room walls.

Creating Heroes

Linked to the above section (R&R), a key part to any culture change is creating heroes - people

who typify the culture that we want to change to. In our context, once innovation projects and

small wins are achieved, it's critical to create stories of 'People Like Us' who have achieved

success in the new New Way. The stories share how these individuals have created breakthroughsand achieved success. These could be 3-minute youtube type videos of people telling their

stories, sharing their journey, videos demonstrating how different heroes went through and

overcame different sticking points.

The idea is to further create 'Greenballs' - successful innovators addressing live peer groups

sharing what they did, how they did it and the benefit to them. Nothing creates enrollment morethan 'people like us' telling us how we did something and how it benefited people like us.

Also position these heroes outside the organization in peer communities. Position them as

speakers at steel conferences, manufacturing conferences, supply chain conferences et al.Position them at every possible external management conference. Again nothing builds up people

so much as being recognized by outside peer groups. It also creates a tremendous surge in others

within the organization to do something similar.

Create an Essar Steel (and later perhaps an Essar group of companies) Book of Innovation

Lighthouses where the story of the innovation project is written about in depth and the book is

widely circulated among the Essar group of companies. There is something timeless and a hint of


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immortality in seeing ones name and achievements in print and especially in the form of a book

that ones children can read. And this creates a tremendous groundswell of passion for innovation.

Develop an online platform where Innovation teams can post sticking-point challenges and

anyone inside or outside the organization can contribute with suggestions or ideas of getting past

the sticking point. Anybody can be a contributor and contributions can be tapped from universityprofessors, subject matter experts, lead thinkers, practitioners and so on. Rather than make thesefacilities available for R&D alone as so many organizations do, make them available to

everybody in the organization. And you know an Innovation Culture has been created when

you spot a workman calling up an IIT professor to get his views on a technical challenge

he's facing in his innovation project.

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rolling out an innovation culture

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