Prospective Partner Profile - Innovation Management

We anticipate that this pack will appeal to organisations or service providers who are principally involved in facilitating better innovation outcomes. You will most likely already have an innovation management framework and possibly some ideas management technology to assist you in this task. In your work you will have discovered that successful innovations have invariably come from the development of some critical personal networks that are able to shepherd new ideas and inventions into successful commercial outcomes. You will be looking for new ways in which these networks can be more effectively managed for maximum benefit.

Optimice has developed a networks centred framework for innovation that focuses on the critical roles of Explorer, Engager and Exploiter that we call “The 3Es of Innovation”. We use our toolsets and methods to firstly visualise the ecosystem of roles and people that make up the innovation landscape; and then explore ways that we can accelerate the pace of innovation.

Case Study - UK Facilities Firm

Context
A UK based facilities management firm responsible for some 30,000 houses and some 700 staff.

The Problem
The firm was concerned that improvement ideas were not getting to the people who could develop and implement them.

The Solution
An Organisational Network mapping exercise was conducted to identify who the key explorers, engagers and exploiters were across the organisation. The people identified were engaged as change agents in support of the implementation of a new ideas management system

The Benefits
Successful innovations require an idea to traverse the different communities supporting the explore and exploit activities. The understanding who play these critical roles provided some needed intelligence to ensure highly prospective ideas were brokered to the right exploitation teams.

Case Study - Major Health Agency

Context
A major health agency employing over 100,000 staff.

The Problem
With a large and geographically spread organisation, sharing knowledge around best clinical practices was not happening. A program office was established to facilitate best practice sharing.

The Solution
An Organisational Network Analysis exercise was initially conducted to assess the effectiveness of the program office in engaging the regions in best practice sharing. The program had been established with a 3 year tenure The members were shocked when the analysis showed that even though they were well connected with the regions, when they were removed from the map to simulate what would happen once their tenure was up, all that was left was the regional silos that they started with. The program changed its direction to one of facilitating inter-regional connections to build more sustainable change.

The Benefits
This case study and several others like it have shown the downside of being too cohesive. Strongly networked groups can become impervious to new ideas that do not fit the mould. Reliance on idea brokers is required to break down this situation. Read more in our white paper on "The Tyranny of Top Down".

Deliverables

Some example tools and outputs are shown here:

Network visualisations are conducted to identify the community of Explorers, Engagers and Exploiters For Explorers we look at two communities.

1. The first looks at those individuals who bridge communities, supporting the “Strength of Weak Ties” theory which suggests that breakthrough innovation tends to happen via our weak, rather than strong connections. The network of explorers is also mapped as the source of incremental innovative ideas.
   
   
2. The critical ‘Engager’ role identifies those roles or individuals who connect explorers with resources required to progress an idea.
   
   
3. The final mapping is for the Exploitation communities. Here we map those staff that are best at implementing incremental innovations. The second mapping is for communities where the exploitation is complex or of a breakthrough nature.
   

The output form an innovation network ananlysis is the identification of ‘key players’ in the innovation network. The example below is a ranked list of the ‘engagers’ i.e. those that are best placed to connect idea holders to idea exploiters.

The map below shows the interactions between the idea generators (explorers) and those that set challenges for them (engagers and exploiters). The data was ‘mined’ from the electronic discussion activity for the group over a 10 day period and shows how relationships were building between explorers and exploiters over this period.