Innovation can take many forms. An organization develops a new product or service. A new business model offers customers a new brand experience. A new strategic partnership is formed, resulting in new customer segments and new distribution or communication channels.

More than ever before, organizations view innovation as a strategic priority, giving them a competitive advantage over others, at a time in which most employees are asked to do much more with much less. Who has time to innovate? It’s tough enough to slog through daily operations without having to think up new ways of doing business, too.

Making innovation a strategic priority often requires that stakeholders make a shift in their thinking to make innovation a consistent, repeatable part of their daily business routine.

“Creativity thinks up new ideas, but innovation takes that idea and turns it into action,” explains Lisa Bodell, Founder and CEO of futurethink, adding that “Stakeholders need to separate good ideas from great ideas before turning that great idea into a business thought.”

Ideas are the easy part. Knowing what to do with them is the trick that turns a creative idea into a business innovation. Consider the Swiffer, that nifty collapsible mop with replaceable ends. During the research and development process, P & G took an ethnographic approach to determining what was missing when people cleaned their homes. Once the gap was identified, they created a need and subsequent demand for their innovative product.

Admittedly, not every organization has P & G-sized resources to combat hurdles to innovation which, in most organizations, include lack of time, money and inadequate staffing levels. Bodell states that other hurdles include “an evaluation process that squelches innovative ideas, no way to track the progress or success of innovation initiatives and no way to tap into the thinking of employees, partners and users.”

A good place to start in your innovation initiative is to find out who in the organization is already doing something interesting or cool. Interviews, focus groups and surveys will elicit employee knowledge, opinions, attitudes, and degrees of satisfaction with existing innovation initiatives. Once that baseline is established, an overall approach to innovation can be developed.

The Quest for Innovation: A Global Study of Innovation Management 2006-2016 was a survey commissioned by the American Management Association and conducted by the Human Resource Institute. This polling of 1,356 global leaders captured the top five elements necessary for developing an innovative culture in any organization. That is, 1) customer focus, 2) team work or collaboration with others, 3) appropriate resources (time and money), 4) timely and effective organizational communication, and 5) the ability to select the right ideas for further research.

“You can tell the culture of an organization by looking at the arrangement of furniture, what people brag about and what they wear -- similar to ways in which you get a feeling about someone's personality,” notes Carter McNamara, MBA, Ph.D., in his Field Guide to Leadership and Supervision.

The steps to creating a culture that supports innovation on a daily basis are more accessible than one might first imagine. Every cause needs a champion and innovation is no exception. Innovation requires top down support, where those at the top lead by example and encourage stakeholders to take smart risks.

“What often limits innovation in any organization is that people tend to want to ‘get it just right’ before sharing their ideas,” explains Bodell. “Leaders who support innovative thinking need to help employees become comfortable with sharing their ideas- and works-in-progress.”

Artists at the Academy Award®-winning Pixar Animation Studios share their beginning sketches and drawings of animated characters with team members early in the process. This allows them to stimulate the thinking of their colleagues, gather feedback and build on that feedback throughout the animation process which adds depth to the finished product.

“Many people worry that by sharing their ideas, someone will beat them to the punch,” remarks Richard Bowers, Ph.D. “There is no limit to what can be done if you don’t care who gets the credit.”

Other steps in creating a culture of innovation require leaders, managers and supervisors to encourage new and alternative thinking and to share subsequent ideas within business units and across the organization. Everyone needs to know what others are working on and feel a part of the whole. Employee feedback about the status of organizational innovation can be captured in surveys about employee engagement, employee satisfaction, working relationships, and organizational assessment.

To foster a culture of innovation, leaders must support their teams with resources and expose them to creative ways of being. Offering tools for creativity and innovation on the company intranet is a start. The workforce must feel motivated to participate fully in innovative thinking without fear of reprisal. Employee recognition for innovative ideas – from a day off, memo or heartfelt thank you -- means someone noticed and cares. And, remember to keep people apprised about what happens to ideas as they make their way through the innovation pipeline.

If you would like to learn more about how Survey Software Online can help you identify activities related to innovation and help keep your stakeholders apprised of your innovative ideas, check out our website at www.SurveySoftwareOnline.com.

Jan Stringer West, Ph.D.
Organizational Psychologist
Survey Software Online
Addison, Texas

There is a clash of the titans going on in the Web-based applications arena. In the blue corner, from Redmond, Washington, the veteran multi-national computer software behemoth Microsoft. In the red corner, from Menlo Park, California, the Sultan of Search Engines, Google. The two have been trading punches for the past few years and the fight is just getting started.

The Microsoft versus Google battle features two companies approaching the Web-based applications market from completely different directions. Bill Gates and Microsoft built its empire on desktop applications running on local PCs, while Google conquered the online search and advertising markets. As Microsoft tries to grab a slice of Google’s search business, Google has been counter-punching by going behind the firewall of Microsoft. What lies ahead is a day where the Internet and browsers, instead of a computer’s operating system, may be the foundation for application development.

Watching Microsoft and Google slug it out for world domination of the computer industry has significant implications, pushing technology to the limit in a race for supremacy. Over the past few years Web-based applications, or Webapps, have been establishing themselves as the preferred platform for business information systems and other critical applications. They are part of the Web 2.0 generation, where websites allow users to do more than just retrieve information. They house the ability to access interactive facilities, allowing users to run software applications entirely through a browser.

"We're on the cusp of the next generation, the next revolution in computing," Matthew Glotzbach, product management director for Google, recently said. "We're really being ushered into the era of cloud computing."

“Cloud computing” refers to applications and data stored online and accessible from any device with a Web browser. Browser-based software never requires installation processes or hard drive space because it lives in the virtual cloud on the Internet. And whenever you launch it, you always have access to the latest version, unless the Internet connection at your local Starbucks isn’t working.

The blog you’re reading now is posted on Survey Software Online (“SSO”), a complete Web-based user interface and communication platform that enables business professionals to effectively create, deploy and report the results of surveys.

Web-based applications like SSO combine the communication capabilities of the Internet with software resident in the “internet cloud”. A Web-based application is a program that resides entirely on the Internet as a multi-user, cross-platform application that allows many users to work from it at any one moment in time. The many advantages of using this technology are beginning to win over the computing populous.

One of the biggest advantages of Webapps is accessibility. Since applications like the SSO app are based on the Internet, users anywhere in the world can access them.

Plus, the constant updating and that annoying “network administrator” have been zapped by Webapps. Instead of every user having to download patches for their operating system, which seems like a weekly process, patches and upgrades are applied to the Webapp server so it has no impact on the user. The network administrator, who blocks every bit of software you try to install on your system, is bypassed through Webapps.

It may seem that Web applications spell trouble for software makers, and to some degree they do. But software vendors are adjusting to the times. Webapps opens a wider market for software vendors, who aren’t constrained by having to write code around a specific hardware platform and limit their market or incur additional costs to build for another platform. Many bugs and computer viruses are squashed in Web-based applications because no union is necessary between the Webapp and the local computers operating system, which can be rife with problems.

Webapps make the Green movement giddy. With software boxes, printed manuals, shipping costs, CD’s, and all the environmental consequences involved to distribute software, Webapps are both economically and environmentally friendly. Furthermore, Webapps eliminate the entire software piracy issue with one click of the mouse, leaving the U.S. government time to focus on those high-seas Somali pirates instead.

Web-based applications, because they are developed on open source platforms and supported online, provide cost-effective solutions. Webapps work any where, any place, any time, and even conquer the Mac vs. Windows issue, which, of course, is a whole other battle of the titans.

Dr. Jan Stringer, Ph.D.
Research Associate
Survey Software Online

The current recession has almost every company in a state of red alert, cutting costs across the board, from canceling the year-end bonuses to purchasing cheaper toilet paper for office bathrooms. No expense is being spared.

However, the employee has been the most unfortunate victim of the recession. With unemployment at its highest rate in a quarter-century, tens of thousands of workers have found themselves in the cross-hairs of cost-cutting, and thousands more are wary of being next on the chopping block.

“Everybody is so fearful that companies are thinking, ‘What can we hang on to and what should we liquidate?’ ” Martin N. Baily, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton told the New York Times recently. “A lot of the reduction in employment is businesses deciding to close down operations or get out of a certain line of activity.”

Scary stuff to think about, especially if your company just ordered a big supply of pink slip paper from the local Staples. But more and more experts are warning companies to tread carefully when taking the slash-and-burn approach to controlling costs, and think about the value proposition of what they’re doing. Sacking a bunch of employees may look good to the bottom line, but if it ultimately undermines the fundamental value proposition to customers, that company’s reputation could suffer a fatal blow.

Cutting costs is nothing new for companies, but most want to do it without sacrificing results of their products or services. The SSO idea is a fairly mainstream offering to companies that are looking to trim their budgets. The range of cutbacks can swing from creative to downright kooky. Here are a few:

▪ Employees at Microsoft won’t have to worry about ants at the company picnic, because there won’t be any company picnic. The software maker is cutting the fat and fried chicken out of its budget, canceling its annual summer picnic for the Seattle-area, which includes about 41,000 workers. That’s a lot of potato salad.

▪ At SRS Inc., employees have been recruited to be cost-cutting cops. SRS, a FEMA contractor, enlisted the help of its workers as expense monitors, rewarding individuals based on their efforts to help the company save money. One coordinator centralized office supplies ordering for SRS’s five offices through Staples, making ordering more efficient and improving the bottom line.

▪ An Australian television station has really taken a fanatical stand, downgrading the staff’s free luxury coffee to the bargain-basement Nescafe brand.

▪ Air travel is down around the world for the ninth consecutive month, according to the latest industry statistics, and business travel is one of the main culprits. With the economy in the tank, companies are cutting costs and staying at the office, choosing conference calls and virtual event solutions. As the economy sags, many events marketers are adding virtual events to their calendar. ON24 Inc., a supplier of webcasting and virtual-event solutions, recently released the results of an online survey it conducted of more than 300 enterprise business executives about their plans to attend or host live trade shows, conventions, and sales training seminars in 2009 versus their use of virtual events. Every metric from the survey showed that companies are embracing virtual events over travel, which is more bad news for the airline business.

▪ Where all the money goes is a mystery for some companies, so many are investing in software that counts every penny. Ariba, for example, sells software that helps companies track where they spend money, even when thousands of people in the company are making purchases. The Ariba software consolidates information into one place, so it becomes clear that instead of using seven different suppliers for paper, the company could use just one. Then Ariba sets up a reverse auction for suppliers to bid for business. That should leave the boss shouting, Ariba! Ariba!

▪ Even one of the most extravagant spenders on employee perks, Google, is cutting back, canceling afternoon tea at its New York office. Egads! What would the Queen think? For much of its history, Google spent money like drunken techies, hiring thousands and dishing out generous perks, including three free meals a day, free doctors, ski trips, laundry facilities, and subsidized personal trainers. While the company has vowed to keep the Google culture alive, it predicts that belt-tightening will continue as revenue growth continues to slide.