1. Building the foundations for innovation
How Leaders can Identify and Articulate the Value of Innovation

2. Introduction
In recent years there has been an expectation that innovation will solve all of an organisations problems (The need for cost savings, process efficiencies, market growth and even create new markets). The problem is that most companies find Innovation difficult to define and even more difficult to implement. From idea to implementation can be a long and difficult journey. There are many factors that encourage innovation and many that stop potential innovation dead in its tracks. With this in mind, leaders would be forgiven for not knowing where to start when they are asked to be more innovative. What are they actually been asked to do and for what purpose.
In this short paper we provide a simple process for leaders to start thinking about innovation. By providing a tangible starting place with a simple check list we hope to help leaders create their own innovation journey.
Our 4 key steps to building the foundations for innovation are:
Know your organisations context
Understand what innovation will look like to your organisation
Get the right people involved from the start
Involve all stakeholders

3. 1. Know your organisations’ context
The first and most important task is to understand your own context; what’s the culture like, what are the real working practices, what is the organisation trying to achieve.
There is a sliding scale of what innovation can mean in different contexts. Innovation can range from the incremental to the game changing breakthrough. So as long as the change is both new and adds value, it can be classed as innovation. This is why it is important to understand what innovation means to your own organisation and more importantly what it means to your customers.
1.1 The Vision & Values
Getting to the very core of what a organisation is trying to achieve, and what it believes in, provides leaders with both the direction and the fundamental reason to innovate. It can provide a framework for ideas to be generated that is both forward looking and externally orientated. It allows more solutions to be offered; facilitates more open conversations; and keeps everyone focused on the end goal.
1.3 Appetite for risk
Innovation is not about best practice, it’s about doing something new or different. What does this mean in a word? - Risk! Innovation offers opportunities for creating increased value - beyond what is currently seen as best practice. However, these gains can often be realised at great risk. By understanding the risk position of your organisation, you are in a better place to both challenge and understand what the real appetite for innovation is.
1.2 Context of innovation

4. 2. Understand what innovation will look like
So now you understand the context for innovation, you can start defining what innovation will look like? This can not be done in a vacuum you need to start to help shape the ideas about the purpose of innovation is and what is possible in the organisation. These principles will help to articulate what value means and how innovation can facilitate this.
Organisations can sometimes say they want lots of innovation but really only want best practice and vice versa. Leaders need to be clear and help staff understand how and where real innovation can impact their roles; what risks are involved, and what could actually be gained. This is also a great opportunity for leaders to listen to their staff about what innovation could look like.
2.1 The Art of the possible
Innovation is more likely to happen in an organisation when staff have a less prescriptive view of what the solutions might be. The leaders role is to help both manage staff expectations and open their minds to different possibilities.
2.1 The role of innovation
 2.3 The metrics of evaluation
Only once you have an idea of ‘size of the prize’, and the role that innovation might play, can you think about the metrics of evaluation. This might involve being creative in the way that innovation projects are evaluated as it can mean measuring less tangible outcomes and outputs.

5. 3. Get the right people involved from the start
In most cases innovation will be identified, challenged, validated and embedded by groups of people either working in a dedicated team or through a looser network of individuals from the wider organisation.
3.3 Create a ‘High Performing Team’ from the start
If people don’t know how to have sensitive conversations, generate creativity, or work with difference and diversity: solutions will remain over-simplistic, poorly thought through and generic.
People make innovation happen!
Organisations cannot just put people on a innovation project and hope that all goes well. Innovation requires high performing teams and high performing teams require collaboration, communication, planning, quality time, and hard work.
3.1 Team leadership
Team leaders must recognise the need for innovation and how it will add value. Ultimately leaders must facilitate the delivery of:-
Greater output and outcomes for the available resources;
The expected outputs and outcomes with reduced resources, or
A mixture of both!
3.2 Get the mix right
Given the context along with the appetite for risk and innovation, it’s important to gather the right mix of people for innovation. It is very rare for one person to have all the skills and competencies to:-
Facilitate and have creative ideas;
Identify opportunities for innovation;
create different ways of delivering value;
test and validate alternative methods, or approaches;
roll out pilots or prototypes; and
manage the embedding of the innovation within the existing project framework.

6. 4. Involve your stakeholders
New ideas and innovation are often created by the beginners mind rather than the expert. A good reason to involve people outside of your team, department, organisation or even your sector. Also successful implementation can be reliant on engagement and early involvement of your stakeholders. This said, stakeholder involvement can come with a health warning. If the wrong stakeholders are involved at the wrong time they can become blockers for change rather than advocates especially if it is a product or service the market doesn’t know it wants yet.
4.2 Relationship of collaboration and trust
Leaders must create the right cross department and cross organisational environment for innovation and make sure that the right networks are in place to:
Encourage teams to build trust within and outside of the organisations
Enable others to make their contribution to innovation as well as learning from others contributions.
Make sure that risk is not just pushed down the supply chain or other departments but owned by all.
5.1 Early involvement
Early involvement with the stakeholder community can help identify innovation and understand how and where it can add value. This will help you understand your current market, identify potential areas in which to innovate and how stakeholders can contribute to innovation. This could include customers, suppliers, distributers and the general public. The more you understand the wants and needs of these groups the better chance you have of satisfying them.
5.3 Structured Approach
Giving the wider community an opportunity to contribute to the innovation process can bring some important new perspectives. How much sway these ideas opinions have will be project specific, this is why the input from these stakeholders must be manages in a structured way. Users must be efficiently and effectively managed through key decision makers and ultimately the project’s nominated ‘Innovation Team’.

7. Berkshire Consultancy
Conclusion
Only once you understand your organisations appetite for risk, the context of innovation, considered the opinions of all stakeholders, and looked for ideas internally and externally; can a leader start to talk about how innovation can be built into an organisation/ team.
Only when all these issues have been considered can you understand how innovation might be implemented in your organisation. This process then informs what systems and processes will be used to generate ideas (both in-house, externally or a mixture of both) and how these new ideas will be implemented and embedded.
This is only the start of a leaders innovation journey, but as with most things getting the foundations right from day 1 will have a huge impact on what happens next.
Berkshire Consultancy
Our holistic approach addresses both elements of the innovation process. On one side we work with individuals and teams helping them with creative thinking, brainstorming techniques, capturing ideas, better team working and how to manage creative teams. On the other side we help organisation capture, measure, communicate and exploit innovative ideas, not forgetting that all of this is held together by an organisation’s strategy and culture.