TBX – an approach to developing the innovation culture
Having been involved in several efforts on developing the innovation culture within companies, I have learned that you need to work with three organizational approaches.
I call this the TBX approach:
• T (Top Down) – Get the executives onboard and make them personally committed to the innovation activities. Without executive support, no change occurs.
• B (Bottom Up) – Value creation begins with people, one by one, team by team. Nothing happens unless you get the employees engaged and involved. Take ideas, feedback and other input from employees seriously. If ideas just seem to run down a sinkhole and never to re-emerge or if leaders are not able to commit resources to any ideas, you will lose the trust of the employees.
• X (Across) – The biggest challenges will come from the middle managers placed across the organization. A key reason is that middle managers have a narrow focus on their own profit and loss responsibility. They do not see the full picture and thus will not give up resources that do not benefit them in the short run although it is the right thing for the company in the long run. Thus, if not dealt with appropriately and effectively, they can bring innovation to a grinding halt.
The T and B are quite obvious, but try to step back and think for a while on middle managers and the impact they have had on innovation projects you have worked on. They are much more influential than you might think of and you need to find ways of getting around these people.
You can get results through efficient stakeholder management but often you need also to change they way these people are incentivised. Such changes will only happen if you already have the T in place…
Hi Stefan
Great post. You are so right.
This is the old organisation change problem in another guise.
(T) Top-down management support is essential to give innovation (or any other organisational change) a chance to germinate and take hold. (B) Bottom-up staff and team support is essential because they are going to be driving much of the innovation. More than that, they need to see individual benefits from adopting innovation and team benefits too. If either is missing then innovation won't take hold. (X) Cross functional support by middle management is essential because they have to organise the resources from across the organisation to make innovation effective. Polly Rizova and Rob Cross' work on using social network analysis (SNA) to identify the key people who across the organisation who should be involved in innovation is a very powerful tool to help bridge this gap.
Polly Rizova
Are You Networked for Innovation http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/files/pdf…
Rob Cross
Masterfoods USA Case Study: Driving Innovation in R&D with Network Analysis http://www.robcross.org/pdf/casestudies/masterfoo…
One additional factor you might want to add is (O) Outsiders, like customers, suppliers or just plain others. With the popularity of outside innovation methods (thanks to Patty Seybold for the great name) like Crowdsourcing, Lead User Innovation and Open Innovation, it is pretty clear that it is no longer possible to view innovation as just an internal activity. To be efficient and effective, innovation has to bring in outsiders with the knowledge, skills and experience no available within the organisation. At the very least this means involving customers (to provide knowledge of the jobs they are trying to do and the outcomes they desire from doing them) to direct the innovation process to its sweet spot.
Another factor is (TM) Time. Research on the dynamics of organisation change by Nelson Repenning at MIT shows that any substantive organisational change takes up to two years of continuous support from middle management to embed itself as part of daily business. If middle management's emphasis wanders before this time, seemingly embedded changes can quickly revert to their previous unchanged state.
And another factor is the (P) Innovation Process itself. Innovation is a process after all. This applies just as much to the LARGE-I innovation through stage-gates that creates game-changing new products or business models, as it does to the small-i innovation like Toyota's Kaizen that creates millions (in Toyota's case) of incremental improvements.
No doubt your readers will add other factors of their own to the discussion.
Graham Hill
Customer-driven Innovator
A very well written article!
I'm working in a insurance company as a innovation expert and the biggest hurdles for us at the moment is twosome:
- Gaining monetary resources from top management
- Gaining support and commitment from middle management
The X factor is often neglected/forgotten. When B and T is in place, you wont progress in your projects (ref: Chris Timbles book – "10 rules of…"; the forget, borrow and learn methodology).
Caspar
Graham, I will look further into the O (Outsiders) as this makes a lot of sense as we move further towards open innovation.
I have had the pleasure to meet with Rob Cross several times. He is a great guy doing great work. Highly recommendable…
Casper, glad to see that you have some of the same innovation issues in the financial sector.
Stefan
Stefan,
very good summary. I also agree with the comments on the importance of the X factor – the middle management. This is true for driving any organization change, not just innovation.
With this, my comment, or rather question is this: what do we know about how organizations measure the success of the innovation in the organization? We know that the metric is critical to drive performance and could have a profound effect on how the management driving innovation. And it is clear that, while the long term financial benefits will be the key metric, it alone will not be sufficient to drive allocation of resources by the mid-level manager, simply because the innovation is associated with higher risk of non delivering results in the short term.
Irene Spitsberg
Manager, Breakthrough Technologies
Hi Stefan,
Well said.
One thing most of us miss out is that Innovation is a culture emnating from a coherent Business, Knowledge and IP strategy. If there are sufficient communication channels (and in use consistently in all directions and at all levels) in a corporation, you will create a communicative innovation ecosystem with clear strategic objectives. And everything all of you have said will fall in place, the top down, bottom up, the outsiders(suppliers, customers).
Irene
My organisation creates a constant gap analysis between the Knowledge and IP objectives. Based on Knowledge density and IP penetration audits carried out every quarter, we re-align our tactical objectives. We also use a popular Innovation, IP and KM model as a standard framework for management of our processes, projects and products.
Very good summary.
I agree with Graham that time(TM) is a dimension which is very important especially in companies which are public for which the quarter is the usual time unit ( I know what I mean as I am working in multi national company quoted on NYSE and Paris stock market).
As stated, I am fully in line, implementing a new innovation culture is a 18 to 24 months project which could be completly in contradiction with the short temr objectives that company management could have. It is even worst as if effort are stopped after 12 months there is a good chance that nothing really emerged and then just justify the fact that it was not the direction to go which is for sure a message certainly pushed by one part of the management which is reluctent to change.
It is then mandatory in this conditions to be able to show sort, medium term progresss even if they are not vey ambitious but just to show that the change is going on and it canm be measured.
Just as pointed out by Irene it is very important to put metrics in place since the beginning in order to be able to report the progress.
All of this is part of the process so in summary TBX are mandatory to make change possible but the process is key to make it reality. Without a strong process known and shared in the company there could a lot of effort deployed by people and at the end a lot of frustration because not producing the expected outcome.
Great Article! You're right for this TBX approach.
T – part must be involved as a start and executives must always be fully commited to innovation.
B – part means that all ideas must be handled seriously with prototyping best ideas & making it visible in organization.
X – part is essential and you are so right saying that middle managers must be on innovation side if we want to establish inno-culture.
T should exist from start if the organization if prepared for innovations, B should or could be the part of Inno Management, but X is really not easy to get. When all 3 parts are up, you have innovation culture!
[...] des Unternehmens. Für klassisch strukutrierte Unternehmen schlägt Stefan Lindegaard den TBX- Ansatz [...]
Hi,
Well said, awesome summary – something some companies take 5 years to understand- fanastic
Well. I feel TBX is always the way to go in any place. Also innovation happens with persistence and patience. Some/many expect it in very short term, which will seize to happen in reality.