BQF Innovation

The next meeting of the BQF Innovation special interest group will take place in Westminster on the morning of Wednesday July 30th.  The topic is competency traps and the main presentation will be given by Richard Granger, Senior Associate at Arthur D Little.  What are competency traps?  They concern the aspects of a company’s skills, experiences, competencies and successes which inhibit innovation.  In this session we will learn how to spot the traps and how to avoid them.  There will be an interactive element where delegates review the potential competency traps in their organisations.

You can see details of the event and book your place here:

http://bqf.org.uk/cgi-bin/eventdetail.cgi?Event_Code=728&ID=1688

Please book early as places are limited.  Members, guests and non-members are all welcome.

Paul Sloane

The BQF annual leadership conference went well.   Here are some of the key messages I took away from the speakers:

Tim Cross, former army officer, gave an inspirational talk.  He argued that the key thing missing for most modern leaders was a sense of moral purpose.  We think we can solve society’s ills by exercising levers in politics and economics but without a moral imperative we will not succeed.

Susan Scott-Parker, founder of the Employer’s forum on Disability, asked whether the world was a frog or a bicycle.  Is it one organic whole or can you replace and upgrade parts?  She believes that assumptions are more powerful than facts.

Tim Peach, MD of Taylor Woodrow Construction, believed that everyone in the company could improve by 15 to 20% so he set about a programme to change behaviours.  This started with 360 feedback sessions and went on to a series of actions and activities that have affected everyone.  His message was very well received and he was bombarded with questions.

Nigel Risner, superstar speaker, gave an energetic and entertaining performance which challenged the audience in many ways.  Do leaders know the key personal priorities of their people?  What represents success for you and are you spending time on making it happen?  Are leaders handling different types of people in ways appropriate to their (animal) characters?  Each message was delivered with humour, interaction and creativity.

The was lots more excellent stuff from the speakers and it was good to network.  Make a note to come to next year’s event.

Paul Sloane

The BQF is hosting a leadership conference on June 11th 2008 with a terrific line-up of speakers including Nigel Risner, Tim Cross, Susan Scott-Parker and Tim Peach.  It will be held at the Latimer Conference Centre in Chesham.  There are more details here:

http://www.bqf.org.uk/sbp_studytours.htm

Paul Sloane

We had a successful meeting of the BQF Innovation Unit today in London where the topic was Knowledge Management for Innovation. Professor Michael Kelleher gave a comprehensive explanation of KM. Some of the points he made were:

• The cost of ignorance is high. NASA and the British Nuclear Industry both lost important early knowledge.
• You should align your KPIs to achieve innovation through KM
• Corporate Yellow Pages allow you to find key skills and experiences
• Employees need to be motivated to share expertise so put it into objectives and appraisals
• ‘After-action reviews’ and ‘lessons learnt’ need to be captured
• Organisational story telling is a key part of KM
• To help with innovation we need a searchable corporate memory of past failures as well as successes

Martin Fowkes, who is responsible for KM at Taylor Woodrow then covered what they are doing in this field. When it comes to innovation the Taylor Woodrow motto is - Think, Prove, Do. (Many other companies operate - Think, Analyse, Reject.) They promote innovation through physical innovation notice boards and an innovation buddy system. Before they bid on a new tender they search their knowledge base to look for relevant experiences. They then run workshops to generate innovative approaches.

There was a discussion on related topics. Many participants use Microsoft’s Sharepoint for KM. Blogs and wikis are increasingly important tools.

If you are a member of BQF then Pat Myles can supply copies of the Powerpoint presentations from the day.

Next Meeting will be on July 30th in London with the topic - Competency Traps - presented by Arthur D Little. More details will follow.

Paul Sloane

Innovation and Kowledge Management

Guest speaker  - Professor Michael Kelleher.

This presentation and interactive session will illustrate a model of knowledge management that will enable participants to understand the key elements of KM. Secondly, the presentation will offer insights into how knowledge management can underpin innovation through supporting connections between people, sharing ideas and learning lessons from what works and what needs improving.

Some examples will be provided from the Scottish Enterprise project that sought a knowledge management model for innovation as well as current work underway at Selalfield.Participants will be able to assess their own organisations’ capacities to integrate knowledge management and innovation.

Places at this meeting are limited please contact Pat Myles on 020 7654 5013 for further information.

Paul Sloane

We are running another Master Class on Innovation and Creativity in London on May 12th.   Key topics I will cover include:

Paul Sloane

We had an excellent meeting on Feb 5th.  It was kindly hosted by the Royal Mail at their offices in Old Street.   The meeting started with a talk from Robin Mar of Royal Mail who gave examples of the successes and difficulties that they have had with innovation.  They introduced a prize competition in order to reduce absenteeism among their 180,000 employees.  Despite some scorn in the press it was a big success and reduced absenteeism by 26%.  Robin shared some other examples including their driver risk assessment scheme and some highly innovative direct mail initiatives.  Among the issues he discussed were inertia, risk aversion and insularity.

Matt McNulty of consultants Mouchel then gave a presentation on their innovation efforts.  Some of his intriguing examples included allowing traffic to use the hard shoulder on the M42, which Mouchel recommended to the Highways Agency.  When Mouchel had a problem with silo mentality at a client they came up with a board game which people played to learn the interdendency between departments.  Mouchel have 250 innovation champions to aid the idea generation and implementation process.

We finished with an interactive exercise on Transformers - a technique to force creative thinking in a process or procedure.  The teams came up with some great ideas and the feedback was excellent.  Copies of the presentations are available to BQF members from Pat Myles.

 Paul Sloane

The next meeting of the BQF Innovation Unit will be on the morning Feb 5th in London.  It is kindly hosted by Royal Mail at their offices on Old Street in EC1.  We will discuss innovation in services and processes.  Robin Mar of Royal Mail will present on their experiences.  There will also be a workshop session on Transformers, a powerful technique to generate innovative ideas for service and process improvement.  There is no charge but places are limited so please book early to avoid disappointment.

See you there.

Paul Sloane

The annual BQF Innovation Seminar was held in October at the Latimer Conference Centre.  The speakers included Mike Carr, Chief Scientist at BT’s research labs, Philip Anderson, Chairman of the Global Business Partnership Alliance, Kevin McFarthing, Global Director for Strategic Alliances & External Relations at Reckitt Benckiser, and Paul Sloane, head of the BQF Innovation Unit and author of the Innovative Leader. 

Mike Carr emphasised that innovative ideas can come from anywhere so you have to set your antennae to hear ‘weak signals’.  He pointed out that when it comes to research and development, finding the right question is harder than finding the right answer.  And he warned that a good idea can be thwarted at any stage of the adoption process. 

Philip Anderson discussed what makes for successful and unsuccessful business collaborations.  He shared various research findings.  Key among these were the need for shared value systems, objectives and mindsets.  He stressed that relying on the contract and the SLAs were not routes to success.  What was needed was development of trust. 

Reckitt Benckiser is a highly innovative, global company in consumer products with sales in 180 countries and net revenues in excess of £4billion.  Their brands include Cillit Bang, Vanish, Finish, Dettol, Strepsils, Airwick etc.  Kevin McFarthing explained how they have structured ‘RB-Idealink‘ to facilitate open innovation with alliance partners who have appropriate technologies, products or licensing opportunities.  They have strived to make the process easy for potential partners with simple submission processes on their website. Paul Sloane chaired the conference and gave a talk in which he stressed the need for leaders to develop the vision, culture and processes that facilitated innovation.  He gave examples of how this is done with examples from Google, Virgin, Granada, Alessi and Haier. 

The BQF Innovation Unit has regular informal meetings throughout the year as well as its annual conference.

Paul Sloane

The next meeting of the BQF Innovation Unit will take
place on Monday November 26th from 4 to 6.30 pm at
the BQF offices in Westminster.  The topic is the
innovation value chain - all the elements of generating
ideas, evaluating ideas, prototyping innovations and
then rolling out the successes.  In small groups we
will explore which areas represent the weakest link in
the value chain in your organisation and what you can
do about it.

We have some room for non-members to attend but
we are limited to 40 delegates. 

More details and booking form.