Gathering Extreme Ideas

Published in LaZOOZ - Strategy, Marketing and Innovation Newsletter, Issue 58, By Ari Manor, CEO, ZOOZ

How can we take advantage of the wisdom of our employees in order to achieve extreme innovation? If your organization is large with hundreds, or even thousands of employees, then try the following:

1. Organize an extreme innovation team, comprised of 5 brilliant and open-minded people (not necessarily executives, bright students will suffice). Give them a place and a budget.

2. Appoint a senior manager as the team leader, someone knowledgeable and experienced in development, marketing, and business development. It’s important that the manager has excellent interpersonal skills, and is popular with his colleagues.

3. The extreme innovation team must contact all the employees at the organization once a month or more (via email or other), requesting ideas for innovations that will yield a significant profit – within some sort of realistic context.

4. If too many responses are received, you can narrow them down by giving clear criteria regarding a good proposal (for example, minimum expected revenues and profits) and requesting that the person sending the proposal attach reasons why he thinks that it meets the criteria.

5. The extreme innovation team gathers the proposals it received and discusses them.

6. Reasonable or good proposals that are improvements on what already exist are passed along for processing at the relevant manager in the organization.

7. Proposals constituting extreme innovations, which the organization is not prepared to handle as part of its ongoing development, are handled by the extreme innovation team. The team exhaustively scrutinizes such proposals, and checks them from a business perspective.

8. Subsequent to the preliminary business check, the team disqualifies the majority of extreme innovation proposals, and adopts one or two proposals a year. The team creates a detailed business plan for these proposals, a process that can include the assistance of external experts.

9. The selected proposals are presented to the organization’s management. If it approves, a budget is allocated and a new business unit is established in the organization that will develop and promote the approved extreme innovation, according to the business plan.

10. Using this process, the organization manages to stay fresh, and create one or two spin-offs a year (a new business area that becomes a separate entity of the existing organization).

• At IAI, one of the proposals regarding the security fence was to develop unmanned armored personnel carriers (APC) to patrol the fence. This idea is unsuitable for development by the aeronautics and aviation system engineers. The extreme innovation team identified its business potential, developed a business plan and conceptual prototype, and after receiving management’s approval, a non-aeronautic unit was established at IAI, which develops and sells unmanned APCs. These APCs move continuously on a regular path along the fence, and can identify breaches in the fence, illuminate, photograph, call helicopters, and even open fire in the estimated direction of the terrorists, warding them off
  
  
• In order to maintain and increase the flow of ideas, it’s important to reward employees that send good proposals for both improvements on what exists and for extreme innovation. This is another one of the extreme innovation team’s jobs.
  

The larger your organization, especially if it has thousands of employees, the more important the process described above becomes. On the one hand – the larger an organization, the more conservative it tends to be, and therefore it’s important to integrate built-in innovation, some of which is also extreme. On the other hand – the more employees there are, the more minds there are to contribute, and therefore the above process becomes more effective. We would be happy to help you implement such processes in your organization.