Four ways to be more innovative at work

Every innovation story ever told starts with no one believing it will ever work. So the biggest favour business or society can do for the innovator is to get as many of the right people as possible to believe it will work. And so creating a culture of innovation is mostly about organising faith. But before we get good at organising faith, we must have leadership, an appreciation of time and humility.

The biggest barrier to innovation is our natural fear of change. We don’t react well to change. We like to be comfortable and innovation makes us uncomfortable. So we need leaders not just to be comfortable with change, but to actively embrace it and get involved.

It was direct and energetic leadership that led my traditionally conservative £20 billion national telco to step out of its comfort zone and successfully challenge the status quo in the UK’s sports broadcasting business.

Successful innovation is rarely only created by innovation departments. Innovation departments should not be confused with the hard working R&D teams who should spend valuable time either proving science or making proven science practicable. Often, innovation departments provide an excuse for others in the organization to let their innovation muscle shrink, precisely where it matters most.

And that place is where the regular production of goods and services that make each day on this planet better than the one that went before. One of the hardest things to do is to make the people involved in that daily grind feel empowered to innovate. What they probably lack most is the time and skills to do anything about the idea they have just had. And so organizations that organize themselves to support employees’ ideas will often prove the most innovative.

However, allocating a pre-defined amount of time to people “to innovate” is a good intention which can rapidly become wasteful. Innovation tends to happen in the here and now, when a series of events and circumstances conspire to deliver a flash of inspiration. To make such mini-miracles happen more often, to make them visible and exploitable, and to instil a culture of innovation, you have to help the originator of ideas to become a hero entrepreneur inside your company.

But first we need to make sure that flash of inspiration has potential value and the entrepreneur does not go on a fool’s errand.

To this end, BT created IdeasBank. This is a combination of systems, people and process that allows entrepreneurs from anywhere in the business to submit an idea that might make things better, faster and cheaper for us and our customers. We have a dedicated team from a range of commercial disciplines – not just ICT – to assess the ideas. The IdeasBank team selects hundreds of these ideas from the thousands submitted. It then helps find time and budget for the entrepreneurs to follow up their ideas, and teaches them the complex art of influencing the influencers within a large organization. Our innovation resource provides coaching and advice, but also business case assistance, prototyping skills, design thinking methodology and rigor in the act of making a large business “believe”.

Once the business believes, then innovation can happen. Smaller firms often appear to be more nimble and more innovative than larger organizations. This is in part because it is easier to convince a couple of colleagues to change than it is to convince a couple of thousand people you don’t really know to do likewise. But when those thousands are convinced, the impact of the change can be so much greater.

Last year, one of our product managers noticed something about a variation of the technology that Dolby used to produce outstanding digital surround-sound. He realized it could be made compatible with a new digital conference call system. But first, he had to convince a business that knew everything about operational communications for corporations and governments there was value to be had from a gaming and film industry specialist.

To cut a short story even shorter, within months BT MeetMe with Dolby – an exclusive-to-BT, fully-fledged, globally available teleconferencing service – was at trade shows the world over.This BT/Dolby story illustrates that humility can go a long way towards opening up to innovations that happen outside as well as inside your organization. Fortunately, openness and sharing is at the heart of our innovation culture. I am proud to lead the innovation scouting team here in Silicon Valley.

Every year we host innovation sessions for BT’s lines of business – retail, wholesale and business-to-business. The leaders of these multi-billion pound enterprises take time out of their and their senior colleague’s calendars to come to California. Here they can understand the potential of relevant innovation from outside BT and brainstorm the possible applications for our customers. By doing so they send the message deep into the company that innovation is everybody’s priority.

We also take the concept of shared innovation into academia. We have programmes with MIT, the University of Cambridge, the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras and Tsingua University. Here and elsewhere we fund a total of 22 PhDs and over 30 student interns. And, of course, we are active on industry standards bodies and lead a number of industry-wide co-innovation initiatives such as network function virtualisation.

Time and support for entrepreneurs to seize the opportunity and give their ideas a chance; leadership that is a role model for embracing change; humility to accept that not everything will be invented here; and a rigorous process to get the organization to believe enough in the idea to make it a reality. These four things provide the foundation of a culture of innovation. I am lucky enough to work in a company where they exist.

Author: Jean-Marc Frangos is Managing Director, External Innovation, BT Group

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