Collaboration for Innovation: When and How does it Work Best?

 

The work life of a modern day professional has two key phrases in its description:

1. Continuous innovation and idea generation

2. Making oneself relevant to the business and the organization

These two key phrases are essentially tied to the concept of thought leadership. The Global CEO study by a major IT MNC showed up some telling numbers when it comes to innovation. 40% of corporate chief executive officers and other business executives suggested that employees are the primary source of innovation. About 35% attributed it to customers, while fewer than 20% suggested that ideas primarily come from internal R&D. The reason is pretty simple: At an employee level, there is tremendous amount of collaboration between unrelated thought processes. Customers may not have this luxury, nor will an R&D unit that works according to a predefined thought pattern – exceptions possible.

The first step in any major instance of transformation is when someone thinks about a situation and realizes there is a definite problem to be solved. Then comes the organized thought process and hopefully, a stage where a solution is found. But this poses a question – At what stage is an instance of innovation mature enough to be presented before the people?

If you have an idea, research upon it, build a prototype and present it, it works well for the business in the sense that it is a product that is ready to go. But in this case, you are depending heavily on yourself and your inspiration to get a product out. How often is this viable?

Several ideas that come to you may have been dismissed just because of the fact that you don’t know what to do with it. But someone else might have some excellent follow up thoughts on it, without ever having got the original spark. Collaborating at a very early stage of the innovation process will produce better results than working together on a prototype at a later stage – in terms of the number of ideas reaching the market and also the quality of the product created from the idea