The Innovation Arsenal

By: Neil Greer

In order to innovate, we must locate the people within our groups who are outstanding innovators. Without innovators, investment in technology is no investment at all.

Understanding the fundamentals of what makes a person, team, or organization capable of producing innovation is not a one-size-fits-all science.

Thankfully, there are powerful weapons of innovation available if we look in the right places.

Passion – Find It Within

Sometimes the best weapons can be found by searching in places that seem too obvious to look. Passion is not a quality that can be measured by a numeric value, but teams and their leaders can quickly tell when it is absent. Eventually, lack of passion does show up on the financial statements.

Where you find passion for a particular field or pursuit, you will find five to 10 times the results at one-tenth the overall cost. When people have a high level of passion for their work, they are in pursuit of an answer or a breakthrough, not a paycheck to cash or a timeclock to punch.

Directing resources toward a project where dispassionate, yet qualified, people are involved is the beginning of the end for the desired goal. Passion, many have found, is the enduring quality that precedes the acquisition of resources necessary to accomplish a pursuit.

Manager’s Tip: Next time you have a new project, try forming teams based on team members’ level of passion for the subject matter. How to measure passion? Assign a task of medium difficulty to two people or groups, but reduce the time to deliver in half. The person or group passionate about the assignment will deliver on time or close to it with little objection. The other group will produce excuses faster than results.

Quote to Act On:

“My main job was developing talent. I was a gardener providing water and other nourishment to our top 750 people. Of course, I had to pull out some weeds, too.”—Jack Welch

Rewards – It Isn’t Always About Money

People who are passionate for a cause find a great deal of non-monetary reward in their work, provided they are paid within par for their profession. 

Pareto’s 80/20 law — matched with a reading on the passion barometer — should govern how rewards are given. Try deploying the following low-cost rewards within your organization and measure the effects:

• Take 15 minutes a day to hear about people’s lives. Ask and

listen. Turn off the iPhone and leave the iPad at your desk.

• Invest in their careers.

• Tie project goals to a theme (that they choose).

• Be real.

• Facilitate peer learning; bring in experts they value.

Manager’s Tip: The rewards given to the organization are based on your example, so use the style that is uniquely your own. Look for opportunities to return credit for a job well done to the organization. Balance the group goal with appropriate recognition for leaders. Make sure to listen to the group for clues on what they value and find exciting.

Equal Voice – Allow Even the Inexperienced to Play

Many great things can happen when passionate, well-rewarded (not overly compensated) people focus on solving difficult problems.

Unfortunately, some of the most passionate talent can get overlooked if the well-heeled folks within the organization squelch their voices and enthusiasm.

Take a look outside your office at who is coming up the ranks. They have a specific idea of what the future looks like, and their ideas just might shape the future of the media industry. Young talent needs experience and experience needs youth.

Manager’s Tip: Look within your team and note who dominates most of the discussion. Is it you? Is it your most experienced folks? Is there a strong sense of pecking order? Once you have taken a fresh look at the environment, try creating simple opportunities for less experienced team members to take the lead.

The Latest Technology – Deployed by the Innovators

If you talk with technology veterans and ask them to recount their biggest ROI success stories, you will often hear them rave about the client’s team.  

These days, the tools of technology are becoming less about features and more about complete systems that feed on the activity level within them — social enterprise applications if you will. That being said, technology still needs a partner —the Innovator.

Manager’s Tip: A great place to break in new recruits is testing new technology and systems. Try making testing and implementation of new software and systems part of the regular job assignment of the new guard. Make sure, however, they are paired with a more experienced mentor.

Josh Kopelman, of First Round Capital and founder of Half.com, is one of the most successful startup venture capitalists of the last decade. What makes his approach so intriguing (even after funding 300+ companies), is that the teams he funds rarely receive more than $250,000 in initial funding or the “First Round.” The model, which he pioneered, uncomfortably constrains cash resources but pairs passionate, talented innovators with world-class mentorship.

I believe Kopelman’s resource availability profile for startups is not unlike what exists inside the media properties in local news on a dollar-for-dollar basis.

Once you locate the passionate people (read: innovators) within your organization, utilize meaningful but intrinsic rewards, and make the latest technology available to them. From that core group, the next big innovations just might emerge for a lot less capital than one might think.

 

Neil Greer is CEO and co-founder of ImpactEngine.com, a provider of rich-media solutions to more than 450 publishers in the United States across newspapers, television, and radio. Neil has been in the media industry since 1994.

His column, Go Digital, focuses on sharing experiences that aid in solving key strategic and operational issues facing publishers as they grow their digital operations.