So an acceptance within the company that their customers can contribute to their innovation processes, staff working with the customers or the community type facility to understand how the customers have provided this innovation and how they can make the process even better and easier for their customers too.

I also recall a business unit that had a ‘business proposal’ template/tool for new ideas that helped you figure out the costs and benefits as scaffolding to support thinking through new ideas and raise awareness. It also served as a filter.

That is part of the cultural aspect of showing real support for innovation, and then you want to couple it with infrastructure to make it easy to collaborate, model, etc.

Thanks for the thoughts!

I think some innovation can be driven by a kind of internal venture capital scheme – a big step away from traditional reward scheme – oh thats a good idea, have some money – which personally I think misses the point – something that helps you act as an internal entrepreneur and understand the business processes that you would need to follow in order to carry out your innovation – therefore developing your organisational / BPM or other knowledge at the same time. I have worked for a couple of companies that provided venture capitalism expertise as an external client service, but I was unable to find an internal equivalent offering. If you do have innovative ideas for improving internally, it is useful to have a process, suppport, scenarios you can explore with your own accountability for it working or not being linked into any financial or other gain.

Some internal innovation ideas may not relate directly to your team so it may not be a valuable use of your manager’s or mentor’s or anyone else’s time to ‘coach’ you through the process and/or it still doesn’t provide you with accountability.