Employee-powered Tech Innovation Framework
Stop trying to buy tech innovation.
Instead, create an internal tech innovation framework powered by employees.
I can already hear your objections. “We are too small.” “We don’t have people or time.” “We are too busy.” “We have vendors for this.”
If built right, such frameworks are invaluable assets to organizations. But there are also numerous ways of building ‘innovation theaters’ and labs that look busy but produce no measurable business value.
Let’s start with why.
Why do internal tech innovation?
What is innovation? Often it is seen as a grandiose ground breaking invention that propels the organization into the next tier. But from a practical standpoint the investment into perfecting and implementing the small incremental ideas always yields better financial results.
In “Ideas Are Free: How the Idea Revolution Is Liberating People and Transforming Companies” Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder argued that going after small ideas may be counterintuitive - and yet quite impactful on organization revenue. And when applied to tech, these principles are magnified.
Tech is quite scalable but expensive to acquire and implement, difficult to roll out and painful to switch from. The decisions to adopt new technologies and purchase vendor software often originate at the top level, missing the front employees input. Doing this risks creating real barriers to tech adoption within the organization or purchasing tech that solves the wrong problem, while real problems are being ignored.
Outsourcing innovation to vendors may make sense (after all, they are experts in their field) - but you are an expert in yours and the employees are experts in the current workflows, bottlenecks and improvement ideas.
“But how can they provide input if they don’t understand how software works” you may say. Creating a tech innovation framework addresses this problem, among other benefits.
What is tech innovation framework?
Tech innovation framework creates a repeatable system within organization that optimizes innovation idea generation, evaluation and implementation as it comes to using technology as a business problem solving tool. The ideas may range from using emerging tech to solve previously unsolvable problems, optimizing or automating workflows or reducing errors. The main benefit of the framework is a culture shift that maximizes impact from tech investments, reduces tech resistance and improves tech knowledge across organization.
Why framework?
Tech is a tool to solve business problems and people with deep knowledge of these problems are distributed across organizations. Framework prevents creating silos where the same problem is solved multiple ways in different departments or where tech knowledge is isolated to a specific group.
The framework is highly effective for tech focused innovation, with benefits going beyond R&D.
Workforce development
Employee’s tech skills development is a textbook task for achieving business success. Compare gaining practical knowledge and deep understanding on how technology works with sitting through a high level overview presentation.
People that understand how tech works and knowing how to apply it are the kind of personnel you want to attract and retain.
Vendor clarity
When a new vendor shows up with an amazing promise, a team that understands both business problems and tech real capabilities is the best defense against overspending on unnecessary software.
Mastering emerging technologies
Some emerging tech brings amazing promise while others are duds. Experimentation allows to move past the trends and hype, adopting technologies that move the needle for your company.
Simplifying tech adoption
When technology is pushed down, internal resistance often occurs. Peer trust is critical in successful digital transformation - using framework creates collaboration and sense of ownership, leading to enthusiastic adoption.
Shortening the loop between the problem and solution
Typically the team tasked with adopting the technology does not have a low level knowledge of the specific department workflows. What are the struggles, frictions, issues? The people doing the work can answer these questions best - and the framework allows these employees to suggest a tech-focused solution.
Framework vs innovation labs
Innovation labs - a handful of carefully picked individuals tasked with investigating emerging technologies and the possible positive impact on the org - do sound like a great idea.
And yet Harvard Business Review cites that over 75% of them fail.
Internal tech innovation labs are often too hierarchical. In the research paper titled “Flat teams drive scientific innovation” authors conclude that “tall, hierarchical teams produce less novelty and more often develop existing ideas” - and the reason is very clear. Disagreeing with the manager is rarely a safe idea from the employee perspective, so everybody agrees and goes with the safest choice.
Labs often lack strategic guidelines that align with the general business strategy. This causes two issues: focusing on problems that have limited business value and receiving minimal support to bring ideas to production level.
Labs isolation from the rest of the organization causes two sided issues - they are not exposed to the real problems and the gained knowledge is siloed.
Framework vs hackathon
Companies often run hackathons as an innovation tech exercise. Hackathons solve the lab problem of vague guidelines and are great for building fun and innovation-focused culture, but rarely translate into valuable insights or products.
The produced code quality, lack of post-hackathon support and misguided goals (nobody wants to show a boring script instead of an interesting looking demo) are the most common reasons. Lack of depth and self-filtering (some technologies are too complex to hack in one day) are others.
How to create tech innovation framework
You don’t need expensive software or tools to start. But there are certain ingredients that are required for success.
Leadership support
While leadership should not drive innovation, it must be supportive and guide the direction of the effort so it aligns with the overall strategic business direction. It also should provide support and resources to winning ideas and create an environment where framework can thrive.
Example: suggest strategic targets to get things going (i.e. “how can we automate the most tedious processes?”)
Provide guardrails
It’s easier to generate ideas under constraints. Strategic direction guidance provides location, but guardrails can spark creativity.
Ideas collection mechanism
Before automating (by using something like Trello board or dedicated inbox), consider if all employees have computer access. Managers should be tasked with collecting, evaluating and promoting the ideas.
Protected time
Focusing on tech innovation requires learning what tech can do. That means providing protected dedicated time to learn, experiment or study. Start small. While concerns about productivity loss should not be ignored, consider the upside possibilities. If one idea can generate significant savings, the time investment is worth it.
Tech office hours
A trusted tech resource is invaluable in introducing new capabilities, evaluating feasibility or answering questions. If you don’t have a dedicated IT team, the most technically inclined employees may be interested to step up in that role. Additionally you may consider your existing MSP, software vendors, IT consultants or fractional CTOs.
Success metrics
To measure framework performance, consider both leading and lagging indicators. For example: amount of ideas submitted, employee participation level, submitted to implemented ratio. Measuring ROI on implementation can include tracking time or budget savings or productivity increase. Additionally consider measuring software utilization rates and tech acceptance.
The goal of metric is to see how each phase of the framework performs: from volume and quality of the ideas to impact from implementation and culture change.
Not limiting ideas to tech
It would be a waste to miss great ideas just because they are not connected to tech. Encourage any ideas to be submitted - in many cases tech can be used as a tool for implementation.
Idea selection criteria
Idea selection should be unbiased. For example, you may sort ideas in four-square matrix measuring the possible impact and ease of implementation. Ideas that fall into “easy to implement, medium impact” are the obvious choice.
Putting everything together
Step 1: Building foundation
- Define Your Strategic Goal. Instead of a broad concept, focus on a specific, measurable business problem. For example, rather than ‘scalability,’ narrow it down to ‘reducing the time it takes to onboard a new customer.’
- Establish Key Metrics. Decide how to measure success and how the metrics will be collected.
- Introduce the framework. Create a company-wide communication explaining the purpose of the framework, how it benefits employees and your selected strategic goal. Highlight that all ideas are welcome and managers should support and encourage their teams.
- Schedule Tech Office Hours. Announce regular tech office hours where employees can ask questions, discuss ideas and learn about possibilities that technology provides.
Step 2: Idea generation and selection
- Support managers. Encourage them not just passively collect ideas but actively solicit them and guide their teams to be creative.
- Collect ideas. No need to overthink - even a simple spreadsheet will work. Capture ideas, who submitted them, ease of implementation and expected impact.
- Select a quick win. Choose one or two ideas maximum that are easy to implement but provide immediate visible impact. The early success is critical to build trust and momentum.
Step 3: Implementation
- Implement the idea. Provide resources and support to ensure implementation success.
- Update the metrics. Demonstrate the impact with data.
- Celebrate. Praise the employees behind the winning idea and implementation in the company-wide communication.
- Recalibrate. Get feedback from the teams and analyze the metrics. Adjust based on insights to improve the next cycle.