As companies have leaned out during tough economic times and competition has become more fierce, there has been an increased focus on innovation. Some companies have even set up cross-organizational teams or hired new team members whose sole responsibility and mission it is to come up with new innovative ideas. The idea, of course, is to keep the company on the bleeding edge of their industry and ahead of their competition. That begs the question: Should innovation be an individual or collaborative effort? Is there benefit in enabling and encouraging collaboration? In an October 2009 InfoManagement Direct article, Chris Yeh identified three ways that businesses can use collaboration to accelerate innovation:
- Promoting real-time organizational awareness of opportunities for innovation.
- Shortening the cycle time for experiment conception and design.
- Tapping the power of grassroots participation to drive acceptance, adoption and expansion of ideas.
While you may agree with the points that Chris makes, you may be confused at how you could implement a collaborative environment. Here are a few ways that you can enable and encourage collaboration within your organization:
- Allow team members time to collaborate: Google has a policy called “20 percent time” for their engineers meaning that 20% of their time (read: one day per week) can be spent working on projects that aren’t necessarily in their job descriptions. Many Google products have been developed during because of this philosophy such as: Gmail, Google News, Google Suggest, Orkut, Google AdSense for Content and many new features of current Google products.
- Provide tools to enable and encourage collaboration: There are a variety of tools that allow people to collaborate in real-time and asynchronously which can help with the sharing of ideas, documents, project status updates and other touch points that can accelerate the development process. Some tools to consider to enable more collaboration include: Yammer,Socialcast, Pelotonics, and Google Docs.
- Provide an environment to encourage collaboration: Try setting up an open office environment where everyone sits in an open-space instead of cubicles and/or offices. Fill the room with whiteboards and other materials to sketch out ideas on. If an open office environment is not feasible, consider setting up an area where employees can gather to discuss ideas that is not a conference room such as couches, lounge chairs or other seating areas.
- Hold innovation contests or brainstorm sessions: Schedule time where team members gather and throw any and all ideas out without fear of criticism. This brainstorm session or contest could be focused around product or service development, internal projects to improve culture, or ideas on how to add more value for clients such as additional projects that may be useful presenting to your client. If this is going to be done as a contest, offer a small award and allow the team to vote on the idea that they think will be the best for the company.
While there are a variety of other ways that you can enable and encourage collaboration within your organization, these ideas were to get your creative juices going.
Do you encourage and enable collaboration for the purposes of idea/concept generation?
Photo Credit: andrewarchy
