Because Innovation does not happen in isolation!

We all understand the importance of this powerful word - Innovation - and at Walking Tree we are on continuous lookout for identifying innovative ways to keep people excited about the company, execute projects, keep customers delighted, and so on. With company growing in size, we did not want to loose this focus and decided to create a "culture" of innovation. And, the first thing that we decided to focus on is to define a framework to build a "habit" of innovation. 

We wanted to put together a framework that can enable Innovation. We were clear that Innovation can be the end-result or outcome and we have to define the key ingredients and the recipe to achieve the outcome. We were convinced that Innovation cannot exist in isolation where you announce it in your organisation and start expecting people to innovate. People will innovate, but it may lack certain key indicators, which will make their "innovation" not look that innovative when it is reviewed at the project/team/customer/organisation level. 

In this article, I will list out the key ingredients that we think are critical to an organisation to create the "culture" of innovation. To make it easy to remember, we coined the acronym - I.D.E.A.S

• I - Innovate - This is very obvious part of the acronym. Though this does not translate into any action, we keep it as the first word to set the intent/mindset/emotion/goal/message right for the participants to understand the end goal of this exercise. 
• D - Depth - Knowledge Depth is very essential for preparing the ground for innovation. A "knowledgeable" person will have better inputs/ideas as compared to the one with less knowledge. And, knowledge encompasses the understanding of technical, functional, societal, political, geographical, and other "-al" areas. An organisation shall expose people to different technologies, algorithms, roles, processes, problems, terrible things, wonderful things, etc. to increase their depth. Individual shall look at every opportunity that helps them to be more understanding and hence more depth.
• E - Engage - Once an individual has the required depth, they must engage resources (himself, his/her team, software, hardware, etc.) for the innovation. An organisation shall stress on training people on things like resource identification, allocation, scheduling, etc. to ensure people know how to engage different resources.
• A - Agile - Agility is no more a Project Management methodology. In the time that we are living, this has to reflect in every action of ours. And, same applies to innovation.
• S - Scope - And, finally, every innovation must be done within an identified scope. Otherwise, it turns out to be a research project with no relevance to the present or near future. An organisation must announce themes (e.g. Browser based peer-to-peer games, 1-click resource on-boarding on a project, etc.) as scopes for innovation where people apply their knowledge depth and engage resources - with agility.

With I.D.E.A.S ingredients in place, different organisations can have their own tools and mechanisms to create the "culture" of innovation where people are not just asked to be innovative but they are enabled to innovate, which will go a long way in sustaining that culture.