No Time to Innovate
Take an Innovation Vacation
A popular set of questions that I get asked repeatedly by clients and audience members includes the following:
We know we need to innovate, but who has time?
How do companies balance the day to day operations with the need to innovate?
Without a budget to allocate people to innovation, how can I make innovation part of people's day jobs?
We all know that when it comes to business, and life in general, that
there are two major constraints we all face ' and often trade off one
against the other ' those two constraints are time and money.
Every organization may understand the need for innovation, but it is
difficult to execute in a repeatable way because so many of our
organizations are set up to maximize the extraction of value from
today's operations and do a poor job of balancing this admirable and
necessary goal with the need to develop tomorrow's revenue and
profit-generating operations.
Some organizations set up research and development departments, new
product development departments, corporate venturing arms, incubators,
or skunkworks to try and address the needs for future revenue and profit
streams, but this limits the number of people that can potentially
contribute to the potential innovation process and success of the
organization ' and isolates the efforts from other valuable perspectives
and inputs.
Other organizations like Google and 3M also have some of these
structures, but in addition try and say to employees that they can spend
up to a certain percentage of their time on innovation projects (or
whatever work-related pursuit they might want). In 3M's case the figure
is 15% and in Google's case it is 20%.
There is only one problem with percent time.
The day-to-day deadline pressures and fire drills never disappear in
any organization (even an innovative one), and so often the joke goes ' sure Google employees get 20% time, but only if it's on Saturday or Sunday.
So what's the solution?
Well, after talking with the folks at Intuit as part of the research
for my next book project, I've come to discover that they approach the
time for innovation problem slightly differently.
Instead of just allowing people to spend up to a blanket 10% of their
time on innovation projects, instead they allow employees to accumulate
that time and then schedule time off to pursue a specific innovation
project, often doing so at the same time with 3-4 other employees so
they can collaborate on the project idea and push it forward.
I like to call it taking an innovation vacation.
I think this is the best approach I've heard so far to balancing the
needs of the day to day business and its need for predictable
resourcing, with the desire to invest in innovation to sustain the
business into the future.
Allowing employees to schedule a collaborative innovation vacation achieves SEVERAL key business goals:
- Predictability - It allows managers to do capacity planning and schedule around the employee's absence
- Retention - Allowing employees to take a week or
two here or there to pursue an innovation project they are interested
in, is likely to lead to higher job satisfaction and retention - Collaboration - If you encourage people to take
their time off as cross-functional groups, we know that not only do
diverse teams solve problems better, but we also know from EMC's data on
innovation submissions and finalists that projects pursued as teams
instead of by individuals are 33% more likely to make the final cut - Increased Organizational Performance -
Organizations that have deeper networks and stronger cross-functional
knowledge (more T people) are more likely to work together more
efficiently, have fewer blind spots, have higher employee engagement,
and just have more fun
Time out for a sanity check. 10% time equates to about five weeks a
year, and 20% time would equate to about ten weeks a year. So, if you
choose to pursue an innovation investment strategy like innovation
vacations, you must plan accordingly in terms of staffing (factoring in
of course that most employees won't make full use of it), but I believe
it can be done and should be done ' for the long-term health of the
business.
We try and convince people to allocate 10-15% of their income towards
retirement so that they have money to provide for themselves when they
grow old and retire, why shouldn't an organization allocate a similar
percentage?
What do you think, could you establish something like this in your organization?
What would you do with an innovation vacation?
* Republished from Innovationexcellence.com with permission of the author.
About the Guest Author:
Braden Kelley is the author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire from John Wiley & Sons. Braden is also a co-founder of Innovation Excellence and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy.