Many companies have growth ambitions that cannot be achieved through 'business as usual'. In many industries, opportunities for mergers and acquisitions are drying up, which leaves innovation as the main source for creating company growth
However, most managers struggle to improve their organisation's innovation performance. One reason is that running a company efficiently and effectively requires a different skill set than being creative, and driving a radical innovation through to implementation.
In the past, people have been employed because they are efficient and effective managers, not because they like to experiment and are happy to take risks. Understanding and acknowledging that different skills are required to be a successful innovator is a first step. The next step is to bring people on board who have the right skill set. Understanding design and the contribution designers can make to the innovation process gives managers the means to jump start innovation activities in their organisation. Design thinking and design approaches such as ethnographic research and consumer intimacy are essential for successful innovation.
Designers see it as their role to challenge, experiment, expand boundaries and explore new and different ways of doing things - and there is strong evidence that using design(ers) does make good business sense
Like business organisations, government bodies are facing two challenges: they need to improve customer offerings; and instead of continuously increasing their staff numbers, government bodies need to find new and innovative ways of fulfilling their responsibilities at lower costs. Design and the employment of designers can help address these challenges.
But public services should not only integrate innovation and design internally, they are also in a position to push other organisations - their suppliers, and to a certain degree their customers - toward embracing innovation and design by including relevant requirements in their purchasing specifications.
Traditionally, public service organisations are better at preserving than at embracing something new. At the InnoTown conference in Norway, May 2002 (see also article in Blueprint, July 2002), Geoff Mulgan, then of the Prime Minister's Forward Strategy Unit, expressed his view that government (and public service organisations) can be innovative, but that, more than other organisations, they need to put formal structures in place that enable creative ideas to surface, and more importantly, be implemented.
According to Mulgan, such structures should include idea suggestion schemes that ensure that innovative sparks are not extinguished at first sight. They should encourage prototyping and experimentation. Innovation is not about getting it right first time, nor about perfecting an idea before exposing it to other people. Also successful prototypes and experiments should be allowed to be rolled out gradually in order to facilitate and integrate learning. Such structures should allow organisations and individuals to learn from best practice, inside as well as outside the public service, and finally, there needs to be 'space'. This, Mulgan suggests, can consist of resources such as time, money and people, but it can also be the ability to unlearn.
Need some help? British Standard BS 7000-1 Design Management Systems - Guide to managing innovation gives guidance on managing innovation. Specifically it focuses on products and services and describes how senior managers can plan into the future. It equates new product development with innovation while acknowledging that innovation goes beyond technology.