Written by John Nurkin, VP, New Venture Development, Segment General Counsel, Industrial Products & Services,
SPX Corporation
An innovation culture must start from the very top with a CEO giving employees the time and freedom to experiment irrespective of success or failure. The good news is that recently, some C-level executives have started to set the tone by becoming more visible advocates and supporting efforts to spur increased innovation within their organisations. For example, last year SPX’s CEO Chris Kearney set aside several million dollars to stimulate ideas within the company and to fund the most promising ideas generated by SPX employees. He also established the SPX Innovation Council – a group of the best engineers and thinkers across the company’s various businesses – to help champion greater collaboration and foster an enhanced culture of creativity and ingenuity throughout the organisation. This involves tasking business unit leaders with motivating their teams to take the time to develop unique customer insights, to seek unusual or unexpected sources of information, and focusing more resources on developing new ideas for their business.
Once set from the top, an innovation agenda must be effectively communicated down to the employee base, and include a sustainable process for developing innovative ideas. Above all, the infrastructure should be built up to allow people to participate in the process. This approach must include a system of rewards and recognition (including both monetary and non-monetary rewards), as a way of encouraging innovative behaviours across the business. Executives can also further encourage their employees to look for unique insights and suggest new ideas simply by providing them with the support, time and permission to innovate.
In order to generate truly innovative ideas, most organizations will need to learn the importance of capturing diverse and unique insights. Employees at all levels need to look outside the organisation to spot market trends and customer needs to start the innovation process. They also need to have a way to feed those insights to others within the organisation. Employees should be encouraged to go “hunting” for new and unique insights that will lead to a better understanding of what the true needs in the marketplace are. Only after the needs are identified and vetted should they start brainstorming around solutions.
For maximum impact, employees must be engaged from across the board by bringing in people from different areas of the organisation. For example, including HR and finance on customer insights missions and brainstorming sessions is a great way to make sure everyone understands how innovation fits into the overall strategy and to increase the diversity of opinions. In addition, software that allows open collaboration is also a great tool to encourage participation across various functions and business units. In fact, having key employees in each business responsible for collaboration with other units and functions is increasingly crucial to the success of any organisation. Creating areas where employees feel free to engage in brainstorming and lateral thinking around these needs is another way to help generate meaningful, breakthrough ideas and solutions.
SPX recently announced a revolutionary cleaning and sanitation procedure that highlights the benefits achieved through an innovative corporate strategy. APV FX SafeWater from SPX revolutionises sanitation and CIP cleansing procedures in food, beverage, dairy and pharmaceutical industries. By combining water with a small amount of salt and applying an electrical current, a natural disinfectant is produced that is very similar to the chemical process used by the human body to fight infection. Benefits include increased plant up-time by reducing cleaning time, shortening changeover time and improving employee safety. This product was introduced after identifying a specific customer need for more sustainable cleaning solutions and gathering insights from outside the organisation on the best applicable technologies.
In summary, the ability to capture a diverse set of inputs, coupled with the ability to anticipate future needs, allows organisations to recognise new ways to respond to growing customer requirements and realise potential solutions. The primary benefit from open innovation is around developing unique or novel insights. Open innovation provides a diversity of inputs. By encouraging broad based employee involvement and looking outside the corporate walls, organisations are bound to open themselves up to new ways of viewing the world. If the correct approach is applied, many businesses might be surprised by some of the things they could find out.
Click here to read this article in the December issue of Manufacturing Digital!
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