When we re-think who innovates in an organisation, we can begin to see opportunities in different places. The question shouldn’t be who can innovate, it should be how can we reduce the barriers to innovation in roles across the organisation?
The innovating myth
Research, Development, and Innovation (RDI) in every organisation is associated with innovation for obvious reasons. It can go by different titles but, in larger organisations, it is usually some configuration of these words. But innovation comes in many guises. Sometimes it isn’t so obvious what is an innovation and what is not. The innovation myth in many organisations, is that you need to be somehow related to this special department to participate in innovation. Everyone has a role to play in innovation because innovation can happen in different aspects of the business or organisation irrespective of whether you are a private company, a public agency, or a third sector organisation.
Three modes of innovating
Many people think that innovation must be something high-tech or something patentable. In reality, if you look at the word innovate and where it came from, we broaden our understanding about what can be considered innovation. Etymology Dictionary records its origins from the Latin innovationem and innovare dating back to the mid 16th century. This is important because which in turn, innovare, means ‘to renew or change’.
We have turned the term innovation into something almost mystical or unknowable. Some people seem to be able to do it while others cannot. But in its essence, it means to renew something or to change something. From this perspective, many things can be renewed or changed. The following are three ways of using innovation to transform organisations.
1. Process innovation
Processes are the backbone of any organisation. They are relied on for almost every function. When an organisation is looking for ways to improve what they offer or how they offer it, the processes that underpin their offering are ripe for innovation. This means developing new methods that save time, reduce costs, improve results, or align more with customer needs and expectations. These processes are behind the scenes and are generally not visible to the user or customer. How you develop your products and services is much more protectable than what you offer. These are the things that people don’t see.
2. Business model innovation
Business model innovation is a way to change how the business makes money and captured value. Often industries can get stale with how they work and don’t really think outside the box on how they can be different. When this happens, it is time for a shake up. By either diversifying your business model(s) or changing it all together, it is possible to be innovative in your industry.
3. Product and service innovation
Changing or renewing your product or service is much more in line with what is currently viewed as innovation. This is where you are adding new features, new product lines, new services, etc. This is also the kind of innovation that we see get headlines when something is overtly ‘disrupted’.
Everyone has insights
Training people on how to be innovative and how to spot innovation allows them to participate in it. Everyone has something that they know better than most other people. They have unique insights into how the organisation could work better. This means that each person can see potential opportunities that other cannot.
When more people in an organisation have the ability and the agency to be more innovative, the organisation can become more innovative.
Practical ways to contribute
The thing about innovation is that it is never done alone. There is always need gather others around your insights and to help sort fact from anecdote. So here are a few ways that anyone in higher education can start to think and act more innovatively:
- Keep a log of inefficient processes.
- Making notes of processes that don’t make sense, are no longer fit for purpose, or just miss the mark in terms of user experience is an important starting point to process re-design and innovation.
- Share one improvement idea per month with your team.
- The next step in improving processes is to share this list with your team. It may be more productive to do this one insight at a time. Then have a discussion of who should be involved in looking to improve it.
- Pair up with someone outside your department to brainstorm improvements.
- Many times, to improve processes in organisations, it will require collaboration with others outside your department. It is also important and helpful to get external perspectives and ideas to develop more robust solutions that can be prototyped and tested.
Innovation in higher education
Higher education is no different than other complex organisations. There are many sources of innovation in higher education. There are the more obvious ones like the outcomes of research and RDI projects. In these, there are already some expectations of products and services that can help wider populations if only they can be captured and guided in the right direction. Oftentimes, the outcomes themselves are the point of the research or the project. With the results sitting on the metaphorical shelf when the research or project has moved on. This is an issue around the world in higher education, and it is one that institutions are taking seriously by building more development avenues to be able to utilise these outcomes through productization or building companies to take the innovations to market.
Students are another source of innovation that exist in the higher education context. These include students who have their own ideas to make their chosen study areas better. There are also student-company projects that have students working together with external stakeholders to create solutions for those entities.
Professional services staff, who are experts in their own fields, whether that is marketing, admissions, all the way through to alumni services are also good sources of innovation. This is especially true when speaking about process innovation. As federal and local budgets get cut for educational institutions on all levels, it is important to look for ways to develop new methods that save time, reduce costs, improve results, or align more with customer needs and expectations. Process innovation becomes a necessity. By seeing support functions as opportunities for innovation and not bottlenecks are how to get started with process innovation. This means that service functions can be seen as partners to build stronger, more resilient, organisations when you provide innovation training to all staff.
Innovation as a shared responsibility
As this post sets out, innovation is an organisation-wide responsibility that can propel it forward to be more efficient, more user-centred, and a more satisfying place to work. When employees of all kinds are provided the agency to develop and improve their own work, they are more interested and engaged in it. This does not mean that everyone needs to be doing it all the time. It means that when the opportunity arises, they are empowered, through mindset, agency, and skill, to look deeper at the problem that needs to be fixed. This way of working sets it apart from organisations that only promote this kind of innovative thinking and doing in certain designated pockets of the organisation.
When beginning this transformation to an innovation mindset in an organisation, it is best to begin with small changes. This allows people to see the power of the process. It also reduces the stakes and gets results quickly to solidify the usefulness of distributed innovation.
