65% of the Australian economy faces significant disruption according to a recent report from Deloitte.There has been much said and written about how companies can disrupt, rather than be disrupted. A key component underpinning a company’s ability to become more disruptive is its ability to capture and harness the unique and diverse opinions, insights and perspectives of its workforce. Companies that have tens of thousands of employees are usually at the greatest risk of disruption because of their legacy infrastructure, a culture of avoiding failure at all costs and processes implemented to sustain, rather than create.

Should we not just leave innovation to the innovators?

Innovation is as much about connecting the dots as it is about having a Steve Jobs moment.

In fact, Steve Jobs himself was all about connecting the dots and many of Apple’s most iconic innovations weren’t the result of a lightbulb moment, but were an evolution of previous innovations and Steve’s own personal experiences.

Case in point, the original Macintosh typeface was the result of Jobs dropping in on calligraphy classes at Stanford, the minimalism of Apple’s hardware is a testament to Steve dabbling in Zen Buddhism, the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the original Macintosh was in fact ‘borrowed’ from Xerox after Steve had visited the company’s research centre.Jobs famously said “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

Every employee is capable of contributing dots.

Every Workforce Offers a Wealth Of Untapped Knowledge

Whether a company has a hundred, a thousand or one hundred thousand employees, it has access to an untapped resource of unique, diverse and broad perspectives and insights that employees of these companies don’t share effectively.

Any company with client facing staff has employees who each and every day make hundreds of observations and generate new learnings, either consciously or subconsciously. These insights aren’t being captured anywhere that's visible to or useable by the rest of the organisation and as such, aren't being capitalised on.

The ‘dots’ and insights that underpin innovation are driven by the questions we ask, the observations we make and the people we meet. For client facing companies in particular, these are plentiful and golden.

For example, a large consultancy such as McKinsey has a distributed workforce who all have access to different companies where consultants establish an intimate understanding of the inner workings of the client companies and are well placed to identify problems or challenges faced.

What if that one employee doesn’t have a solution to a problem they’re seeing but somebody else in the organisation does?

What if  one employee has a solution that others in the company also see value in because their clients face similar problems?

What if that employee has a half-baked idea that with input from others across the organisation can evolve into something seriously compelling?

Knowledge is Power

If we aren’t capturing knowledge effectively then we are essentially shooting blanks.

Failing to capture the knowledge of our workforce is nothing short of tragic, particularly in an ultra competitive landscape where companies need to be doing everything they can in order to just stay relevant and maintain market share.

The Problem With Brainstorming

Traditionally, companies have run the occasional brainstorming session with client facing staff or performed infrequent interviews, trying to capture some of that knowledge.

This approach is flawed for a number of reasons.1 - It doesn’t capture everyday observations and only those that are fresh in the memory so we only capture a very small percentage of the employee’s experiences

2 - inspiration can strike at any given time (often while exercising, in meetings, upon waking up, or for many, in the shower) - it can not be forced upon us in brainstorming sessions, the mind simply does not work that way. Often the opposite is true and these sessions can be counterproductive, participants feel pressured to contribute during brainstorming sessions and come up with poor ideas at these sessions and do so for the sake of doing so, not because they are actually good ideas.

3 - the cost of interviewing staff individually or in groups over time is very expensive and again, it does not capture the insights collected throughout the year and only those that are fresh in the memory

How Can We Better Capture and Harness Knowledge?

Idea management platforms have emerged as a much more effective way to capture knowledge centrally so that visibility is ensured, dots can be connected and new opportunities for growth can be capitalised on.

How do idea management platforms work?

Essentially every member of your organisation can submit problems, challenges, ideas and so on, which can be accessed centrally by the entire organisation.Submissions can be tagged according to different areas of interest and can also be aligned to a particular question or challenge that the company sets. For example, the telco Three ran a four week campaign asking people to submit accounts of when they had gone the extra mile to make things right. In just four weeks 292 ideas were submitted and 5800 votes registered. The results of this campaign fed into a successful marketing campaign around how Three differentiates itself from competitors through its above and beyond customer service.

How To Run A Disruptive Innovation Idea Campaign

It’s important to first define your objectives and clearly understand what you are hoping to achieve by using an idea management platform.

Are you looking to capture general ideas, problems and challenges that employees observe or run a campaign around a particular theme or problem that the company is facing?

Where running a campaign, it’s important to ensure that questions are asked in a way that prompts smart answers and submissions so that the quality of submissions remains high in order to support effective review of submissions later on and avoid death by volume.

Where possible, we should also look to provide some guidance around submissions.

For example, if we are looking for ideas with the potential to disrupt then we need to provide people with guidance and context as to what a disruptive idea might look like.

Using the disruptive innovation litmus test, made famous in Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, we can give would be idea submitters a lens through which they can look at their idea to ensure it fits the criteria before submission.

Far too often companies that run idea management campaigns to spur disruptive innovation solicit hundreds or thousands of ideas and far too often only a very small percentage of these ideas actually meet the definition of an idea that has the potential to disrupt.

For example, if it’s disruption we’re after we should ask people to answer yes to these questions before proceeding.