The Innovation Process at Unique World – Part 1

Managing innovation at an SME like Unique World is really all about people management. People, not technology, are the source of the ideas that can become opportunities. People, not organisations, act on business concepts.

Our approach at Unique World is still in its formative stages, but in essence, it is about taking new ideas and allowing them to be reviewed and either approved, tweaked or rejected by a representative committee of our people.

Once the idea’s have passed thru the committee stage they are taken to the executive of our business who ultimately decides if the idea has a robust enough business case and alignment with our core business and strategy to merit real capital investment. Or if the idea should be put on hold pending further time, information or consideration.

Luckily, Unique World already has many of the attributes an SME needs in order to allow innovation to flourish:

• An open culture that responds to staff, customers and suppliers; and
• We know that Innovation requires creativity and creativity requires time.

Whilst we are still working out some of the logistics associated with taking a consulting based organisation (where time equals billing) to one where the appropriate levels of an individual’s ‘billable’ time is allocated to creativity. We are already seeing changes in behaviour of both management and staff in how they are able to create time for that creativity to occur.

Tim Mazzarol, Director of the Centre of Entrepreneurial Management and Innovation in Western Australia, advises: ‘Contemporary innovation management requires the active participation of all employees with adequate rewards and recognition of such behaviour. Management plays a key role in this process, motivating employees to seek innovative solutions and identifying opportunities for enhanced innovation via interactions with the customer. It is important for organisations to build innovative management systems able to assist with the facilitation of knowledge sharing and commercialisation’.

As Tim points out innovation is more than just the commercialisation of idea’s – it is a holistic management system, that is able to facilitate knowledge sharing, customer/ client and partner interactions as well as commercialisation. At Unique World, we are not quite at this level of maturity but I can see a day where we will be.

Part 2 in a few days time, got any comments or questions about our process - send em thru…

Focus on Innovation

Of late I’ve been getting a lot of question about my role at Unique World as Head of Innovation? Many customers, partners and even internal staff are rather confused by the title and don’t understand the purpose and effect of innovation on the marketplace or the Unique World business as a whole.So what is the purpose of a Head of Innovation in a smaller enterprise like Unique World, well our executive and board have identified innovation as one of the key paths to fuel geometric growth in our business. And have decided to use Innovation to drive change in our offering to our clients and the internal team (both within our consulting services and software products).

It’s my role to work with all parts of the internal business and our strategic partners and customers to generate and govern innovation. Beyond just the governance it’s also my role to build an innovation culture and as a direct result the wanting to do thing smarter through innovation.Russell Reynols and associates (who are regarded as leaders in this arena) define the skills needed for the role as such:

Innovative Thinking: This person is known as a visionary and can demonstrate that he or she has predicted and acted on consumer/customer/client trends, getting others to believe and follow. He or she is known as a creative thinker who is willing to challenge the status quo but also learns from the past. He or she uses fact-based analyses but is not paralyzed by too much data (or not enough). This person is known for taking a well-reasoned stand and is decisive in terms of moving forward on a proposal.

Strong Business Acumen: The innovation leader has developed new businesses, products or services with the bottom line in mind. He or she has a record of sound fiscal management and has strong analytical capabilities. He or she has a balanced approach to revenue generation, operating cost management and bottom-line delivery.

Strategic Marketing Acumen: This person has the ability to develop and implement a marketing plan, driving actions from a comprehensive understanding of customer and consumer needs, then providing concise direction to the organization to develop profitable solutions. Underpinning this is a record of systematic and analytical approaches toward situation analysis evaluation and the development of specific programs that maintain a perspective on long-term goals while attaining short-term objectives.

Deal/Alliance/Relationship Skills: This person has not been constrained by resource limitations and can economically determine “buy/rent” decisions. He or she has forged significant business partnerships through strategic alliances, joint ventures or other forms that are mutually beneficial. He or she has a strategic network that can be leveraged.

Global Perspective: The innovation leader has the ability to quickly envision or grasp ideas found in the global and local marketplace. Acting with a sense of urgency, this person demonstrates a predisposition toward action, while evaluating programs in a small market environment with low economic risk.

Communication Skills: Finally, he or she must be a keen listener, be perceived as open minded and have strong interpersonal skills so that the necessary alliances with internal and external groups can be forged and developed quickly. This person must be comfortable interacting both formally and informally with senior executives and communicating openly and equitably with peers and subordinates throughout the organization.

I know I have not yet developed all of these skills, but I am keen to develop them quickly so I can be effective as possible in the role. It certainly is very exciting.In my next post I’m going to let you in on what the innovation processes has been cooking up at Unique World and how we’ve started to innovate within our core business.

MOSS 2007 Governance

More and more businesses I speak with are  struggling with ways to successfully deploy all of the applications and business requirements that can be delivered in a MOSS platform without some structure and process.

To help you succeed Microsoft has recently published a specific Governance and Information Architecture page on TechNet to help organize these key materials.

• Information architecture in SharePoint Server 2007 – Scott Case of Interknowlogy, in this case study describes the process by which a fictitious company plans, customizes and deploys an Office SharePoint Server 2007 installation in a large organization.
• SharePoint Products and Technologies customization policy - Sean Livingston, then of MS IT, now the PM for upgrade in WSS for the next version (hint, hint).  He explains his thoughts on supportability of customizations in 3 levels of service, a plan that MS IT uses to manage it’s hosted offerings of SharePoint internally.
• Sample governance plan – Mark Wagner, MCS lays out an easy to fill out enterprise governance plan, including defining governance roles and responsibilities, operations policies, training, and resources.
• SharePoint Server 2007 governance checklist guide - this handy reference guide takes information from Robert Bogues article as well as information from Joel Oleson’s TechEd Governance talk and articles being published on this landing page in the coming weeks.  This is exactly the same as the Governance checklist given out at TechEd.
• Logical architecture model: Corporate deployment - Brenda Carter of the Technical Documentation team for TechNet SharePoint IT Pro, lays out an easy to use, fresh take on “logical architectures” which goes into examples of construction of farms, SSPs, Web Applications, and Site Collections. 
• Governance Workspace – This codeplex workspace on governance focuses on free tools and information sharing in the community.  Two tools, both from MS IT currently are available here.  The MS IT Site Delete capture, and the the IT Site Life cycle management.  Both designed to help save the IT Pro time and money.

Beyond these great documents from Microsoft we at Unique World are also putting together a Governance Toolkit that will cover:

• The Managing and traking of business requirements for applications developed in MOSS 2007;
• Development Standards and Code reuse processes in MOSS 2007;
• Deployment and migration advice;
• Operational issues eg. Monitoring, Backup and Restore;
• Change Management; And
• UAT and testing processes.

We would love to hear from you if you think the above list is missing anything or if you’d like to be a beta site for the program just get in contact with me via the links on this page.