When you first think about innovation, statistics may not be at the forefront of your mind. We are often drawn to the creative side of the process, thinking of wacky ways to generate ideas.
We may stop to think about the ‘why’ and ‘how’ those ideas could be implemented but how often do we really evaluate our process and our success? What are the Key Performance Indicators and how do we know if we are achieving our goals?

Statistics play a vital role in maintaining the optimum performance of a process. Someone who lives and breathes statistics is Maitha Al Junaibi, the Acting Director of the Department of Methodology & Quality Assurance at the Statistics Centre – Abu Dhabi (SCAD). Maitha also manages their innovation lab ensuring ideas and applications are explored from inception through to successful conclusion. Maitha is perfectly placed to understand the need and benefit of statistics in innovation so read on for her take on why statistics should be part of your innovation process…

‘Innovation is widely accepted as an important contributor to increased production for organizations. Employees are encouraged to generate new ideas, promising ideas are selected and a chosen few are implemented. Successful innovation promises benefits but change involves risk and the potential for failure. Larger innovation projects may take time to implement; with new practices requiring time to settle and rewards being delivered over the longer term. With all the potential uncertainty, how can project managers and senior management judge whether the project is on course or has taken a downward dive? How can we fine-tune the project and prepare for deviations from the expected course?

The solution to this question is the application of statistics to proper project management, including innovation management. Statistics fundamentally deal with uncertainty. Statistics provide us with a way of summarizing raw data to produce meaningful measures that can help us to understand whether or not we are achieving our goals. Setting the appropriate goals and objectives for each stage of the project is central to charting progress. In part, this requires a good understanding of what the innovation project is intending to deliver at each stage and for what effort and cost.

Defining the appropriate success indicators is an important part of the task. Ensuring that the indicators are measurable is also vital. Unmeasurable objectives, based on intuition and gut feeling, will be of limited value and possibly detrimental. People are subject to confirmation bias and may interpret evidence either favorably (if they are supporters of the project) or negatively (if pessimistic). For this reason, success must be defined in advance so that it can be monitored appropriately, i.e. we need a clear understanding of what outcomes are expected and by when. We also need a plan for collecting the appropriate data and a plan to produce statistics that show us whether or not we are meeting our success criteria.

Statistics require data. Business intelligence data may already exist in the form of sales and profits for commercial organizations or take-up for non-commercial organizations. As the aim of innovation is to increase efficiency, market share, sales, and/or service take-up our key measures of success will be measures of these objectives; and targets may be gradually staged over time to allow customers to adapt and behavior change to occur. In addition to these hard measures of success there will often be an interest in how customers react to change. Are current customers happy with the innovation? What features do they value and what is not liked? This information will help to fine-tune change. We may also be interested in what is motivating potential customers to hold back from using our services. How can we encourage them through understanding their needs? All of these questions form a part of a company’s marketing strategy and largely should be answered using statistical procedures through market research.

What we want to achieve is good quality data that enable us to make the best decisions in our monitoring and evaluation of the innovation project. If we only took the opinions of satisfied people our data would not accurately reflect the views of the total population, we would not recognize the areas where we could be doing better and not maximize our sales or take-up. Similarly we want to avoid selecting only negative people. As such we want to ensure that our sample selection mechanism includes a random component. It is this randomness that helps protect us from accidentally oversampling groups of people who may be easy to contact and persuade to respond, but who also may be more or less positive or negative than people in general.

We must summarize our mass of data to make sense of it. Measures such as totals and averages provide easy to interpret summary statistics. We can ask if differences in an outcome measure between different groups of people are likely to be real or to have occurred by chance when using samples through applying statistical hypothesis tests. Statistical models can be used to identify which features are more or less important in understanding differences between the characteristics of people when making a choice of one outcome option over an alternative option (to buy or not to buy). Recent advances in data visualization also offer a wide range of tools to summarize data pictorially and to make it easy to see important features.

Statistics are concerned with ensuring high quality data collection through appropriate questionnaire design and sampling techniques. Statistics help us to select appropriate sample sizes, keeping data collection costs down; and provide a suite of appropriate estimation, analysis and presentation tools. All of these tools are vital for proper project evaluation, especially when used alongside clear objective setting and well defined success criteria.’

So if you are involved in an innovation process and you have yet to take a serious look at statistics, maybe now is the time to start.

In our fast paced world, mechanisms and methods that shorten cycle times leading to quicker outcomes when implemented properly, can prove essential.  One of the best known methods for accelerating innovation is the IBM Jam, which I have personal experience of, with lessons learnt whilst working for a previous company.

In a global organisation, with thousands of employees, it’s no mean feat to attempt an organisational wide initiative. There are considerable benefits when buying into the expertise created through a tried and tested method.

For our ‘Jam’, the launch plan was meticulously developed. Much focus was dedicated to building awareness of the campaign and engaging employees prior to the ‘go live’ period.  Senior leaders championed the various challenges, all of which were aligned to critical business needs.  A real sense of anticipation built in the days prior to launch and the Jam went live to the entire corporation.  As we all joined in the big conversation there was a sense of excitement; people wanted to get involved and contribute their ideas.  Face to face workshops were completed at a local level to further engage employees and encourage involvement.  The actual event proved a resounding success, with hundreds if not thousands of ideas generated.

Lessons learnt from this experience, while seemingly obvious, were quite profound:

1. Support from leadership is readily and enthusiastically given when the goal is to efficiently implement and improve critical business needs.
2. People at all levels and skill sets within an organisation have ideas and are very willing to share them.
3. Organizations need a vehicle or method to collect these ideas (this post by fellow Future Shaper, Simon Hill, gives some good insight on this).

So what happened next?  Sadly, and this is not unique, very little.  The volume of ideas proved overwhelming and whilst the launch plan had been developed and executed to perfection, as an organisation, we had failed to develop a robust process to implement the ideas, never realising a commercial benefit.  Much attention was given to the wedding, but little, thereafter, to the marriage.

The key learning here, is that accelerated innovation is not just about collecting ideas.  We all know that without implementation, ideas are just thoughts.  To gain timely returns, you need a well-defined process from start to finish.  That is you need to ensure the pathway has been mapped and resourced from ideation through to implementation.  Having high energy, intense communication to generate multiple ideas is great and coupled with having the resources to deal with those ideas effectively and ensure fast implementation is the key to successful accelerated innovation.

To effectively run an accelerated innovation process, from ideas generation through implementation takes time!  I know that sounds an oxymoron, however without the time taken to plan how the ideas will be implemented, including allocating resources in advance and enabling early identification of barriers and methods to overcome, there will be little or no implementation.

An alternate method to deliver accelerated innovation is the NHS Hack days. Originally the brainchild of Dr Carl Reynolds, academic clinical fellow in respiratory medicine and CEO of Open Healthcare.  NHS Hack days utilise social media to promote events which aim to improve and develop NHS technology for everyone’s benefit.  Initially, anyone who has an NHS technology based problem to solve is given 60 seconds to pitch to an audience, generally made up of passionate tech-savvy individuals.  People then join the team where they feel they can add most value.  Everyone volunteers their time, has fun in the process and collaborates to develop quick solutions. These are presented at the end of the two day ‘Hack’.  The secret to success, is people get to work on a problem that interests them, for a cause they believe in with the problem ‘owner’ being motivated to implement sound solutions.

Whilst a Hackathon is traditionally an event for computer programmers, the NHS are expanding their audience and the method of bringing a group together, over a fixed time period, to collectively solve a problem, is gaining traction in many organisations.  One such example is the ‘Boot Camp’, where a business critical problem is identified and shared with employees, who can pitch their interest and expertise to get involved.  Individuals with the passion and skill to participate are assigned to a team and spend 3 – 5 days co-creating workable solutions.  Success is driven as participants want to get involved and are given dedicated time to deliver viable solutions. The problems solved are business critical, allocating resources to ensure the solutions are implemented.

An additional approach is the ‘Dragons Den’, where rather than the focus being on ideation, it is on the implementation of ideas.  A challenge is opened for a fixed time period and, as with most methods, ideas are collected.  They are all reviewed within two weeks of the challenge closing with the originators of the best ideas being invited to present their concept to a panel. The panel consists of senior members of the organisation, the ‘Dragons’.   Successful ideas gain funding and a ‘dragon’ champion to ensure effective implementation.

In our fast paced world, the benefits of shortening cycle times cannot be denied and developing a method to suit the culture of your organisation could really enhance your innovation capability.  As long as you have a business critical problem that needs a quick solution, there is a method of accelerating innovation that will work for you.  Why not try one of the methods highlighted? You can always start small, perhaps at a team level and perfect your process, working towards engaging the entire organisation in an organisational wide event.  If you have an existing open scheme to collect ideas, a fixed time event can provide a great marketing opportunity to re-invigorate your scheme.  If you are yet to ask employees for their ideas, these methods provide a great opportunity to achieve and publicise quick wins.

So, if you are looking to develop your organisational capability, bear the following factors in mind:

• Identify business critical problems to solve and senior leaders to champion implementation
• Develop a plan for the entire process from ideation to implementation, including allocating sponsors, resources and potential barriers to overcome
• Create excitement and a sense of anticipation in the lead up to an event so people want to get involved and are willing participants
• Set a time frame, adds to the sense of urgency to achieve outcomes
• Shout about your success, positive PR to encourage future engagement!

Keep in mind, that idea generation and solution implementation methods must be repeated regularly for an organization to remain competitive in today’s fast-paced ever changing world.