How to build an Innovation Factory

What is innovation and how do we make innovation intrinsic to an organisation?

Recently I attended Australia's most innovative company awards. The recipients were all impressive in there own right, however I came away questioning whether people understood innovation...

Firstly,  what is innovation? Sometimes confused with invention.  Invention is a type of innovation, a new product/service,  usually the result of an idea.  Innovation at a corporate level more generally however is about improvements, not necessarily something new. As a Business Analyst I practice a systematic approach to improving the current state. We elicit the problem or need, and work with subject matter experts to improve the businesses capability. Innovation is most often the result of careful analysis and a process of 'questioning assumptions'. Think there is a false impression that all innovation is born while sipping on a cafe latte.  Sure some innovation stems from ideas,  but clearly much less predictable and repeatable.

Now that we are clearer with what innovation is,  how do we make the concept part of the business? I heard someone mention the concept of an innovation factory, which got me thinking... how do we build one? If we wanted to create continuous innovation what are the critical success factors?

Well its quite simple ...lets start with a quote

"When you say “collaboration”, the average 45 year old thinks they know what you’re talking about – teams sitting down, having a nice conversation with nice objectives and a nice attitude. That’s what collaboration means to most people. But for Google and many other companies, collaboration is a profoundly new approach to orchestrating capability in order to innovative, create goods and services, and solve complex problems" 
Don Tapscott, MacroWikinomics

A profoundly new approach to orchestrating capability in order to innovative, create goods and services, and solve complex problems...BINGO

Collaboration maturity is a series of events where we learn to connect, share, solve and then once the group has achieved these levels of collaboration maturity we are able to innovate.

So how do we improve our collaboration maturity?

1. Invest in the right technology...with a Enterprise Social Platform (ESP) at the centre
2. Embed collaboration in process...meeting management, executive engagement, project delivery methodology, etc
3. Change the organisational mindset...Trust in beta, public by default, understanding networks, responsibility to share, appreciating context (over content) 

If it was that easy everyone would be doing it...Get collaborating