Generating innovation from top to bottom

David Winter at Benenden Health discusses how businesses can foster a culture of innovation

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, innovation is a key driver of success. However, many organisations still struggle to understand how to go about this effectively and create a culture that generates and delivers innovation from top to bottom.

While the term "innovation" often brings to mind groundbreaking inventions or disruptive concepts, it is equally important to understand that the term encompasses incremental improvements and effective execution too.

Thankfully, there are a few simple things organisations can do to enhance culture and accelerate change in this way, improving engagement, productivity and competitiveness.

Open innovation to all – and not just for big ideas

Often the first barriers to effective innovation are only considering big, costly and time-consuming solutions and limiting idea generation to senior figures within an organisation.

It should also not be siloed within specific departments or roles but embraced across the entire company. Organisations that successfully build an innovative culture provide an environment that fosters collaboration and enables teams to join the dots cross-functionally to create viable solutions that have impact.

Promoting a culture that encourages, incentivises, and provides permission for employees to generate ideas is crucial. Start-ups often excel in this area due to their agility and self-starting nature, which allows them to experiment without being hindered by extensive processes or rigid structures. However, that shouldn’t deter larger organisations from doing the same.

Broad and deep innovation can be encouraged via challenges, competition and targets that widely distribute innovation focus. For example at Benenden Health all teams have a Continuous Improvement (CI) Initiative, where all departments, teams and individual employees have a role in finding solutions to save the business time or cost through innovation.

Furthermore, by recognising that the skills required for future success may differ from those of the today, organisations can encourage employees to embrace positive accountability for innovation. Through ownership of their ideas and seeing them through to execution, individuals can adapt to the changing business landscape while contributing to the organisation’s overall efforts.

Test quickly, and don’t be afraid to fail

A key step for organisations wanting to accelerate innovation breadth and pace is to embrace a more rapid test and learn process for new concepts, features and market offers. Quickly deploying, evaluating, and refining a concept allows for rapid iteration and improvement.

Speed is often vital to successful innovation, so test and learn is often a better place to start than spending months and years getting to a point where you are confident your idea is ready to be rolled out. Competitors may have jumped ahead of you, or the market may have evolved, whilst you have lost significant time, money and effort and never discovered if your idea was a good one!

At Benenden Health, as a healthcare mutual,  we want our Members to use more services that improve health outcomes, more often. As a result, we trial initiatives with specific groups that we hope see potential benefit, understand their feedback – both what they say and how they interact with the service – and refine, adjust, scale or close based on what we learn from the data.

This whole process can be done in just four weeks for less complex innovation. The knock on effects of this cycle speed means the organisational innovation “muscle” is better honed and insight as to what solutions are right for which Members continually improves, enriching the product development process.

Many businesses shy away from more rapid testing of innovation due to risk aversion, without fully assessing the potential balance of risk and reward. By compartmentalising and evaluating material risks, organisations can make informed decisions and reduce fear of the unknown.

Often the risks of a small-scale concept test going wrong are very limited and can be remedied very quickly. Conversely the risks of standing still can be existential!

Take innovation seriously, and dedicate time for it

As well as providing employees with the license to come forward with ideas and suggestions at any time, organisations can also adopt various practical approaches to generate continuous improvement.

One effective method is through hackathons or hack days, where cross-functional teams collaborate to identify and prioritise concepts. By bringing diverse perspectives together, these events can help shape ideas, weed out non-viable options, and move forward with a select few credible ideas.

At Benenden Health, we run 60-minute make overs, which are fast-paced, problem-solving sessions for localised issues where we identify a problem, come up with solutions, and assign ownership of actions within the group. This activity is part of our ‘Be Smart’ Programme, which is designed to embed a continuous improvement culture across the Society.

Adding these sessions into calendars and committing to them can help bring that continuous improvement that we’re all striving for.

Regularly reflect. Stopping is as important as starting

Success in cultivating a more innovative environment can also come from the ability to reflect on trials and experiments, regardless of the outcome. Organisations that embrace failure as a valuable learning experience can extract insights that inform future changes and build the resilience needed to persist in their creative endeavours.

Stopping and quickly moving on from initiatives that are not yielding results or failing to align with organisational goals is equally important, as it helps re-allocate resources effectively and maintain momentum.

Overall, building this culture requires an organisation-wide commitment that values both concept and execution. By encouraging innovative thinking, providing permission to execute ideas, and fostering a safe environment that accepts failure as an integral part of the journey, organisations can unlock the full potential of their teams, more quickly and more often.

Embracing practical approaches, understanding the blockers to innovation, and learning from successful examples contribute to building a thriving culture of innovation.

 With a culture that rewards creativity and execution, organisations can drive continuous improvement, agility, and competitive advantage for years to come.

David Winter is Head of Innovation at Benenden Health

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and miniseries