- What are your innovation principles?
If you really want your
people to innovate,
I suggest you keep your
innovation principles simple,
easy to understand, easy to
remember, and easy to execute.
What am I talking about?
Let's go to the UK.
Let's visit Tesco.
Tesco, operates supermarkets
with thousands of products,
millions of customers, and it
can easily get complicated.
So at Tesco, they're very much focused
on keeping things simple.
So when they're looking
at a new innovation,
whether it's a technology or process
they have a simple three-step formula
that they will use to assess this idea.
And they will ask themselves,
will this thing make it
better for the customer?
Will it make it cheaper for the company,
and will it make it simpler
for the employees to operate?
So better for the customer,
cheaper for the company,
and simpler for the employee to operate.
And if they don't get a
yes to all three questions,
it's not a great innovation.
But it doesn't stop there.
To help them answer the last question,
will it make it simpler for
the employees to operate,
they have another formula, A B, C,
achievable, beneficial, and clear.
What does that mean?
Achievable, will the employees
be able to do it the first time,
given the right skills and resources?
Beneficial, will this
process benefit the company?
Will it fix something that is broken?
Number three, clear,
is this process so easy to understand
that I can explain it to
someone else without a manual?
Love that one.
A, B, C.
I know, you are looking at me going,
"I don't run supermarkets,
my business is a bit more complex."
I get that.
You might be running a nuclear plant.
You might be building
rockets to fly to Mars.
That's not the point.
The point is no matter what company,
no matter what industry, you can sit down,
you can come up with your
own set of principles
that are easy to remember,
easy to understand,
and easy to execute.
So when your employees
are looking at new ideas,
it's easier for them to go,
"Yes, that's great", "no, it's not."
Too often I see innovation principles
being in a file like
this with a lot of pages
and a lot of words.
And it sounds great when you
read it, but nobody remembers.
So what's the point, if
people don't remember
and they don't have it front of mind
when they are with the customers,
when they are out there executing
what you want them to do?
So, yeah, if you don't have
simple innovation principles
that are easily understood and
executed by your employees,
I think it might be time
that you want to sit down and create some.
That's it, enough.
My name is Tomas Bay,
and I will be back with
more on innovation.
Boom!
