Innovation is about creating value and increasing efficiency, and therefore growing your business. It is a spark that keeps organizations and people moving ever onward and upward.

“Without innovation, new products, new services, and new ways of doing business would never emerge, and most organizations would be forever stuck doing the same old things the same old way.”

Innovation is bringing a paradigm shift in the way the business is done in a rapidly globalizing economy. It is a process of taking new ideas through to employees and customers. It is the conversion of new knowledge into new products and services.

If you are not thinking or doing it now, your competitors are already doing it. Being innovative is being different in a profitable way.

You are not going to survive in the new rapidly globalizing economy through technological innovation alone. If you are going to withstand relentless global competition, you need to radically change the way of doing business. Innovation is everything that helps your enterprise adapt to rapidly changing business environment. Majority of this is gotten from Ideas which can come form least expected source – The Employees!!

Until recently innovation has been seen as the means to turn research results into commercially successful products or services.

Today; while research keep playing its critical role as a major contributor to innovation, many new forms of innovation have emerged.

They include system’s approach to integration of new technologies and processes from other fields, new business models and ways of doing business, and new ways of reaching and servicing customers.

Innovation demands a different set of management/leadership skills and processes than those required for managing an existing set of operations.

Every manager needs to learn how to lead, nurture, and manage innovation. Growing from within through the creation of new processes, products and services is fundamental, because all other growth strategies depend on the capabilities that successful internal growth provides. Growth through innovation reinvigorates your company.

Innovation is not a one-off event, but a continuous response to changing circumstances. Sustainable innovation system doesn’t just help to solve a problem but creates a new capacity, opening up opportunities for further innovation. 

Its leadership that makes the innovation process work. Innovation, new business creation, and venture investing are durable innovation strategies of the market leaders.

How does Innovation Differ from Strategy
Unfortunately, innovation is often conflated with strategy.  Strategy, after all is a coherent and substantiated logic for making choices, while innovation is a messy business which creates novel solutions to important problems. 

Put simply, strategy is about achieving objectives, while innovation is about discovery; we never know exactly where we’re going until we get there. In other words, while strategy creates a clear path to a goal, innovation is often confused

Please read: http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregsatell/2013/03/07/how-to-manage-innovation-2/

Innovation and Idea Generation – The new way to go!
A recent survey by Accenture, the global consulting company says that for organizations to have utmost productivity and business growth, there must be high level of employee engagement that starts with employee satisfaction through incentives that keeps them happy which is the secret to a profitable and viable company.

Accenture pointed out that for organizations to have utmost productivity and business growth, there must be high level of employee engagement that starts with employee satisfaction through incentives that keeps them happy which is the secret to a profitable and viable company.

This implies that employees’ engagement in a workplace should be designed to ensure that employees are committed emotionally to their organization’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organizational success, and are able at the same time to enhance their own sense of well-being.

The question is how can organizations achieve this milestone on their staffs without compromising and at low cost?

Most organizations believe that to get staff motivation and satisfaction, the following are usually the focus point:

•    Promotions
•    Salary increment
•    Constant training and travels which attracts per diem
•    Whipping them into line through fear of loosing their jobs,
•    Commissions

This is different across industries. One thing these may not achieve is loyalty, commitment and motivation. This is why organizations should look at other ways to get them engaged.

In trying to grow an organization, most organizations depend solely on ideas, opinions and advices from top management, consultants, market trend or bandwagon effect‎ and regulatory bodies. None ever imagine that getting their employees, especially, the lower cadre, who are not part of management or decision making, into contributing to organizations decisions, otherwise known as “let our voice and ideas be noticed”, can trigger emotional commitment and loyalty as it makes them feel they are part of the organization and thus, shares in the glories of the organizations growth and positive performance.

Most times, team meetings are done, committees are formed but it does not address the critical aspect of what can we do differently” to create teaming, loyalty and motivations

The approach above can ‎work but it has its limitations as competitors can easily entice key staffs with improved offers, and you find yourself, constantly trying to please your staffs. This could be counterproductive and is expensive approach.

The solution is for Organizations to create ways to engage every staff toward decision making. Just like social networks, organizations can create an internal Innovation and Idea Generation network hosted on their private cloud, which will allow employees from different branches and departments etc to share their ideas on how the company or organization can move forward.

These staffs are usually, the foot soldiers and field operators who are constantly in contact with the customers and clients.

There is this concern about what happens when you ask people to participate in an innovation effort and then get flooded with too many suggestions?

Imagine where a company, faced with need to ramp up growth, improve productivity and ensure commitment and motivation, decided to tap into employees’ collective brainpower using Innovation and Idea System by challenging employees to suggest ideas for new products and services, how to increase sales and how to improve customer satisfaction.

Within a few days, hundreds of ideas and discussion threads came in with lots of likes and dislikes. For such organization that did not plan for the adoption of Innovation and Idea engine, it will become overwhelming.

To adopt this system, companies must plan for it. The Innovation Consultant and Vendor should be able to handle trainings, creation of teams and support the adoption form day one.

 It is important to note that Innovation requires more than just coming up with ideas. In fact, that is the easiest part particularly when new platforms and tools make it easy for people to contribute.

Filtering and selecting the right ideas, and then prototyping, pivoting, piloting, and ultimately scaling them, in the midst of competing priorities and limited resources, is much more difficult.

So if you’re going to start an innovation effort, think about how to orchestrate the process after you have ideas to work with.

This is where your consultant and Vendor comes in, as the trainings will help organizations to be more specific about the focus and criteria for submitted ideas and challenges the launch. If the parameters are too general, it becomes difficult to sort out the wheat from the chaff.
 
Another way could be to have focused challenges on several specific operational processes, and make it clear what would need to go into a successful submission.

A team of high-potential managers from across the business are selected as “idea champions” and put them through training about how to help employees sharpen their inputs, how to sort ideas into categories, how to rank the ideas in terms of impact and achievability, and how to provide feedback to contributors.

This will enable them to, quickly divided amongst themselves, hundreds of ideas and suggestions, based on agreed common criteria to sort and select those that could create the most business value. By following this approach, the Innovation and Idea Team, called the Champions, would have identified a small portfolio of ideas that were worth pursuing.

 The team, with Management, will create a plan for testing, prototyping, and driving the idea forward. In this way, everyone in the organization not only knew the outcome of the challenge very quickly, but also understood that ideation was only the beginning of a much longer process.

Priority should be given to feedbacks from Management to the idea generators on how the ideas are being progressed, for those ideas that management plans to pursue.

This drives much more commitment from the staffs. This feedback communication is key as staffs will be encouraged to submit ideas instead of being demoralized. Originators of adopted ides could become part of the implementation team

Getting lots of ideas is a key part of innovation and a great way to engage employees. But unless you have a process to manage these ideas, you run the risk of wasting not only the content, but also the good will that comes with it. For an organization to adapt Innovative and Idea generation approach, the following should be considered:

1. Set up an innovation and Idea generation portal or engine where employees can easily post their ideas and feeling around policies and strategy, as well as opinions around performance of products, market, etc. Google, one of the most innovative companies in the world embraced this approach. It’s a standard in Google today, that 20% of employees time should be dedicated toward generating ideas. These ideas are posted on their Innovation Portal, with a summary of such idea while other staffs make comments, likes or dislikes, on the comment. Its highly constructive. To drive this, Management introduced an incentive to the staffs with best idea. Furthermore, it became a KPI that every staff of the company must generate a positive and constructive Idea, at least once a year. These are collected by the Innovation and Idea team who will summarize and share with Management. It’s a highly interactive and valuable Portal and the most important for productivity and growth.

2. Set up an innovation and Idea gathering team whose duties are to monitor the system, gather constructive suggestions/ideas and consolidate them based on certain criteria and send summary report to the organizations ‎Exco, Top Management or board as the case may be.

3. Management can easily challenge staffs with new ideas on Products, policies, projects etc and let them comment and share their opinions around the challenge. This will give management the comprehensive knowledge to make informed decisions around business operations. ‎It further makes staffs feel they are part and parcel of the organization as they regard it as their own! Their voices are heard, their suppressed opinions and creative ideas are also taken into consideration. It brings about commitment, loyalty and teaming, which in general ensures higher productivity and efficiency!

An example of such can be seen in our day to day life. Look at groups at social networks today, like facebook! A lot is harnessed from it. It cannot be ignored anymore. Such internal or private social network can be set up by organizations. It could be privately developed, which can take a lot of time or bought off the shelf from vendors that already have it. Facebook is a social Network, but the workings are similar to what Innovation and Idea generation system can and will provide. The different is that the Innovation and Idea is private to the organization, and at the same time, its focused on Ideas, Challenges and discussions. Depending on the Industry sector, it can be fine tuned to address their target and focus.

Circuit Systems and Networks Communications Limited (CSNC) presently, in partnership with her partner, has an off the shelf solution for this, which can be deployed within 3 to 4 weeks, called IDEACOMB. We can demo the solution to any organization and show the features, functionalities, value and ease of use. It’s critical to note that the investment is low and the value is instant.

As technology drives most of the businesses today, choices on the approach to acquisition and usage should be important. Considering the current economic crunch, it is not advisable for any organization to embark on any technology acquisition without clear understanding of its value and how it could bring expected goal around

•    Cost cutting
•    Productivity and Efficiency
•    Business growth and competitiveness
•    Game Changer

Times are changing; organizations are changing their approach to business operations. Idea generation it’s now an all inclusive approach as most employees,  in organizations, has a lot to offer at any point in time, but are usually not noticed or sort for. The boss and employee approach and era are gradually going, it’s time to reposition strategies and harness whatever one can get. Information and knowledge is power and must be harnessed, if one must survive the current trend and competition in the market

During my recent survey and chats with many people, two things were identified:

1. Most information that can help organizations to manage business, growth and productivity ‎are contained in many databases within the organization. Expensive technology may be acquired in the form of business intelligence and data warehousing to try to harness them, which, do not reflect the reality of things as life and business are dynamic.

2. Most staffs feel like they are alienated from the day to day activities, their opinions are not taken into consideration. Instructions and policies are passed down, and there is no meter to Gauge the pulse and its effectiveness within and outside the organizations. Most achievement is either by sheer luck or helped by market trend. There is this feeling of “management has spoken”! It drives motivation and loyalty down! Most importantly, these staffs are the ears and the eyes of the organization as they are in constant communication with the customers and clients and understand their expectations and needs.

The Success of innovation and Idea generation portal can be likened to the two scenarios below:

Scenario One
‎In a family, the man, as head of the family, can make decisions based on his own opinion and ideas without recourse to anyone. Maybe, his wife can contribute but that is, if she is aware of what the man is doing. A lot of trial and error occurs. Mistakes come and blame game starts. This will never drive the family forward as all decisions are made by the “know it all” head of the house

Scenario Two
Here, the head of the family, engages his wife, children etc to know what can be done to bring peace, love and success in the family. ‎You will be amazed at the kind of suggestions, opinions and ideas that can come from his household, as well as the rippling effect of that singular act. Children become closer to themselves and their parents as they are free to share their views and ideas. Domestic staffs become more committed and loyal. Motivation doubles. The family becomes the cynosure of the society. Stability reigns.

Success can be achieved by a simple act but most times we tend to shift focus from it.

This same scenario can be replicated in organizations. No one knows it all. A lot of management team is alienated from their staffs and clients. The staffs have direct contact with customers and clients and a lot of complaints, suggestions and ideas are shared between them. Management should drive to focus on getting that information that is shared outside their domain. It could be the Game changer.

In conclusion, I came to understand that, for any organization to move forward, they can’t ignore the teaming! They can’t continue to assume and depend on non reality! They have to trust the team they employed because each of them has something to offer. Even a mad man or a drunk makes sense sometimes.

According to Bill Gates, if you don’t practice the change management that looks after the future, the future will not look after you. “…The tendency for successful companies to fail to innovate is just that: a tendency”. Also, As Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, puts it:” The operative assumption today is that someone, somewhere, has a better idea; and the operative compulsion is to find out who has that better idea, learn it and put into action – fast.” And finally, According to Steve Jobs, “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

Leaders in technology development are not necessarily leaders in technology adoption. The most important economic contribution does not necessarily come from the “early adopter” but from the “fast follower” who adopts the innovative design that captures the international market.

CSNC Limited, located at Lekki Phase 1, has re-engineered to offer innovative solutions that help organizations to drive growth, productivity, efficiency, loyalty and commitment. Among such solutions are

Innovation and Idea solution – which is explained above

Automated Meeting management system – This automates Board, Exco, committee and team meetings end to end. Features includes: Generate real-time Directors Skills Matrix: Track Age and Gender Balance, Secured Chat & Discussion Forums: Discuss and share information within the secure confines of eBoard, Create Meetings, Agenda and Dynamic Minutes: Track attendance, Adapt agendas and capture minutes and matters arising via eBoard. Allocate Matters arising for completion to individuals/groups and track progress, Choose from pre-defined Templates: Save time in preparing minutes using pre-defined templates or create your own templates, Board Directory: Easily access information about any Director/Committee member, start discussions, create polls, share information, Online Polls: Vote on polls online, gauge Director sentiment prior to a meeting, Board Evaluation: Create evaluations by either developing your own evaluation templates or utilizing our extensive corporate governance data bank. Score individuals from your laptop/iPad, Evaluation Graphs: Analyze system generated graphs to easily analyze results, Monitor Compliance: Setup multiple compliance authorities, create compliance codes and capture actual compliance documents filed.  Traffic light indicators provide compliance status at a glance. View compliance graphs for ease of analysis,     Online Approvals: Approve/ Reject/Request more information on all pending decisions from anywhere in the world – secured using two factor authentications, eBoard iPad App – Dashboard: View upcoming events, calendar, notifications at a glance.  Your launch pad to the full eBoard functionality

Employee Portal – which allows content sharing, collaboration etc between employees based on rights and workflow. Contents and data can be posted and shared between employees. It acts like a content manager and collaboration tools as well as database for all employees with all contacts, based on positions, title, location etc. It’s easy to identify and collaborate, share contents and engage. It doubles efficiency and productivity

ERP, Payroll, HRMS, Facility Management, etc

Services includes: SharePoint for Portals, workflows, Document Management, Learning and Knowledge Management etc. Also, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Implementations, Trainings and Support

And many more!

It’s time to think SMART. It’s time to improve efficiency, customer services and productivity. It’s time to reduce cost and improve profit/revenue. It’s time to work smart and act smart. Smartness is not about spending huge on technology that does not create value, its about identifying the game changer and adapting to it through automation and technology

Innovation and creativity is the new face of business.

Ethelbert Mbama Chinagorom
MD/CEO
Circuit Systems and Networks Communication Limited (CSNC)
8B Lai Yusuf, Lekki Phase 1
Mobile – +234-7063687377
Direct Office Line – +234-7098125563
email – embama@csn-ng.com