Break Down Internal Barriers

Paul Sloane — Tue, 05 May 2009 18:07:47 +0000

Within larger organisations one of the biggest obstacles to innovation is poor internal communication. A ‘silo’ mentality develops so that departments guard information and ideas rather than share them. People work hard – but in isolated groups. Internal politics can compound the problem with rivalry and turf wars obstructing collaboration. It can reach the ridiculous stage where the enemy is seen as another department inside rather than the competitors outside.

The leader has to tear down the internal fences, punish internal politics and reward co-operation. This sometimes calls for drastic or innovative actions.

Nokia has an informal rule that no-one should eat lunch at their desk or go out for lunch. People are encouraged to eat in the subsidised cafeterias and to mix with people from outside their department. They have found that the informal meetings across departments are beneficial in sharing ideas and understanding. Every organization has to find ways to promote internal communication and collaboration and to fight internal division and competition. Here are some ideas for breaking down barriers to communication:

Publish everyone’s objectives and activities on the intranet so that people know what other people are working on.
Organise cross-functional teams for all sorts of projects. Make them as loose or as formal as you see fit but be sure that there is good mixing and that all the departments involved contribute.
Arrange plenty of social and extra-curricular activities e.g. sports, quizzes, book clubs, hobby clubs, special interest groups etc.
Have innovation contests where cross-functional teams compete.
Have frequent secondments between departments.
Deliberately rearrange the office layout from time to time so that people move desks and sit with new groups (or adopt a hot desk approach).
Organise a cross-functional innovation incubator.
Encourage department managers to look for ideas, input and solutions from outside their departments. Publicly praise managers who do this.

It is natural for departments in organisations to become more insular. As the organisation grows, good internal communication becomes more and more difficult. There was a saying in Hewlett Packard – ‘If only HP knew what HP knows!’ Very often the knowledge and skills needed to solve your problem exist elsewhere in the company. Knowledge sharing and collaboration are essential for innovation success. A key responsibility of the innovative leader is to constantly fight the silting up of the internal communications and to force contact and sharing between departments.

Customers can guide innovation

Paul Sloane — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:07:24 +0000

Customers can be an important source of innovative ideas. Many companies conduct conventional customer surveys and focus groups. These are useful channels of feedback but in terms of original ideas they are often disappointing. Customers are good at demanding incremental improvements in products, lower prices and better service but they are notoriously poor at predicting significant new products or innovations to meet their needs. Before the fax machine was invented who would have predicted he needed it? Which wearer of spectacles in the 1950s would have said that he wanted a lens to put on his eyeball or laser surgery to reshape his eye? You can expect customers to tell you that they want more of what you offer and they want it better, faster and cheaper. But do not count on them to tell you about different ways to meet their needs.

A more lateral approach to gain insights from customers is to study in detail how they use your type of product or service and to observe what practical problems they have.

Fluke Corporation of Seattle is noted for innovative hand-held measurement products. They sent teams of observers to watch maintenance engineers in chemical plants. They discovered that the engineers had to carry a variety of different instruments to calibrate different temperature and pressure gauges. They also noticed that after taking the calibration measurement the engineer would write the readings on a clipboard and then transcribe them into a computer. The process was time-consuming and prone to errors. Fluke therefore designed a new product that used flexible software to allow it to calibrate any gauge in the chemical plant. It also recorded the results, which could be directly downloaded to the engineer’s computer. The resulting product was the Fluke Document Process Calibrator, which became a great success.

Haier is a leading Chinese manufacturer of white goods such as freezers and cookers. Its engineers in rural China were surprised to find that people were using Haier washing machines to wash the vegetables they had grown in their gardens. Turning this unexpected use into a new application, the Haier development team came up with a new wash cycle designed specifically for vegetables. On another occasion a sharp-eyed engineer saw that a student had placed a plank between two Haier fridges to form a makeshift desk. The company responded by designing a fridge with a fold-out desktop - ideal for small rooms that need an extra table or desk top.

Asking customers for feedback is good but observing them can be much better. If you want to gain a march on the competition and design the products and services of the future watch your customers carefully. Look for the areas of unexpected use, the headaches and problems that want to be solved or the unusual combinations of needs or uses. They can give you the insights you need to generate successful innovations in products, services and processes.

BQF Innovation Blog » corporation

Break Down Internal Barriers

Customers can guide innovation