The newly formed Innovation Exchange group held their first meeting on Wednesday 8th November to establish the group’s purpose and hear from group Chair, Ben Pritchard, about his experience of implementing innovation at Invennt.
The group will be focusing how to move from innovation to mainstream, sharing good practice and personal experience to build a bigger picture of how to achieve this. This will be underpinned by visits to innovative organisations and projects to see it in action and bring innovation to life.
What Is Innovation?
Innovation is seen as being all about solutions and something new and disruptive…but at its core, no thing about innovation is new.
All that is required for innovation to take place is an idea, or problem to solve, and a clear understanding of how to address it.
For an organisation to successfully innovate they need to:
- collect ideas
- develop them into tangible, measurable problem statements
- test, grow and deploy any good ideas.
Innovation without context, without direction, without vision and leadership, is wasted.
Invennt
Invennt became the first SME in the construction industry to achieve the BSI kitemark for Innovation management. This was supported by their successful innovation management system. Ben Pritchard took the group through Invennt’s Innovation journey and explained how this system came about.
Their journey began with the creation of a system within a framework, designed to provide direction when exploring innovative ideas.
The process: Intent > Hunch > Problem > Solution > Value
This is all underpinned by the context of the organisation and the support available.
This process enables the company to establish whether an idea is a good one and turn it into a measurable problem statement.
Next, in Invennt’s innovation journey came their Innovation Strategy.
The purpose of the innovation strategy is to ensure that an organisation’s leaders and wider team understand the objectives required to help achieve an the innovation vision.
This should:
- Describe why innovation is important.
- Be flexible and adaptable.
- Identify who is responsible for innovation.
- Identify the organisation’s innovation objectives and how they aim to reach them.
Innovation Management System
Ultimately Invennt came up with their Innovation Management System, which provides a number of benefits to the organisation, such as:
A good Innovation Management System should give the tools, resources and understanding to test ideas.
Allowing Innovation To Thrive
For innovation to thrive within an organisation, it’s important to create a culture of innovation. Organisations needs to ensure their people are enabled to thrive as processes will fail without the people to follow them.
There are several puzzle pieces that need to fit together to truly enable innovation. These pieces must work together to allow good ideas to become valuable assets.
The pieces that need to work together are: Leadership, Strategy, Vision and Policy.
Get Involved
We’ll be releasing more dates for our Innovation Exchange group meetings soon so keep an eye on our events page. In the meantime, why not come along to one of our other events or theme group meetings?
