Ideas have to pass though an idea funnel as most organizations lack the resources to try out all their good ideas. The Economist (2003) states that 3000 bright ideas result in 100 worthwhile projects, which are winnowed down to four development programmes. And four such development programmes are required to stand any chance of getting one winner.

Within the idea funnel, ideas must regularly pass GO and KILL points. Here it is decided whether an idea should remain in order to ascertain its potential or be killed off and make way for a new idea. The selection process can be difficult – drop an idea and you may have lost that one gem; keep it in and you disallow another potentially good idea reaching fruition.

Certain ideas have more probability of success than others.

a) Some ideas will naturally have cultural, technical or other impediments. Condom use in Africa to prevent AIDS is subject to cultural taboos. Non-carbon fuel cars must beat back resistance from the oil industry. E-commerce suffers from fear of Internet fraud. Impediments can be plotted against the S-curve in order to generate a risk profile for each idea under consideration.

b) Some ideas have an inherent greater chance of success than others, depending on their origin. Franklin (2003) argues that ideas that have resulted from solution spotting – when individuals have sought solutions for particular problems – have a significantly greater chance of success than most other ideas. The nearest competitors are ideas that originate from random events.

This topic is covered in depth in the MBA dissertation on Managing Creativity & Innovation, which can be purchased (along with a Creativity and Innovation DIY Audit, Good Idea Generator Software and Power Point Presentation) from http://www.managing-creativity.com.

You can also receive a regular, free newsletter by entering your email address at http://www.managing-creativity.com.

Kal Bishop, MBA

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You are free to reproduce this article as long as no changes are made and the author’s name and site URL are retained.

Kal Bishop is a management consultant based in London, UK. He has consulted in the visual media and software industries and for clients such as Toshiba and Transport for London. He has led Improv, creativity and innovation workshops, exhibited artwork in San Francisco, Los Angeles and London and written a number of screenplays. He is a passionate traveller. He can be reached on http://www.managing-creativity.com.

Traditionally, these elements have consisted of counting defects, measuring costs, and tracking cycle times. Today, as we understand businesses processes better, it has become a bit more involved but no less achievable.

With improvement strategies such as Six Sigma – a set of techniques developed by Motorola that focuses on the process of improvement within a business – there are ample measures available to recognize if your business is achieving its potential, or if it is lacking on one or many levels.

There are primarily five areas of measure for innovation, which include:

1. Performance – your company’s ability to provide a total solution in relation to its requirements and its competition

2. Quality – the number of defects and the number and rate of delay

3. Timing – its speed to the market, including its schedule for internal development (also known as cycle time) and its external market timing.

4. Finances – revenue expectations, costs, margins

5. Development costs – for specific projects

Additionally, there are a number of sub-categories for measuring innovation within your business. These include:

Turnover of personnel

Percentage of product and/or service tests passed

Percentage of reuse (the number of tested items that were borrowed)

Number of specification or requirement changes needed

Percentage of new parts (the number of items that are untested)

Percentage of unique parts (potential areas for difficulty in integration)

Percentage of new vendors

Percentage of staffed to plan (including times of over-staffing and under-staffing)

Percentage of designated time lost to undesignated projects

As you can see, there is quite a bit to consider when you wish to measure the innovation of your business. This often explains the inclination for businesspeople to put off such measurements. However, by doing so, you are only holding back from the ideas, changes, and potential that you could be offered from the result of these measurements. The best time for you to measure the innovation your business is today.

Tony Jacowski is a quality analyst for The MBA Journal. Aveta Solutions – Six Sigma Online (http://www.sixsigmaonline.org) offers online six sigma training and certification classes for lean six sigma, black belts, green belts, and yellow belts.

To recap, below are the Eleven Core Values and Concepts of Baldrige Criteria:-

1. Visionary Leadership
2. Customer-Driven Excellence
3. Organizational and Personal Learning
4. Valuing Employees and Partners
5. Agility
6. Focus on the Future
7. Managing for Innovation
8. Management by Fact
9. Public Responsibility and Citizenship
10. Focus on Results and Creating Value
11. Systems Perspective

I will deal with the one of the Value in bold letters in this article as below:-

Articulated Managing for Innovation:

What is Innovation in the context of Baldrige Criteria? As described in the Baldrige Criteria 2005, it means “making meaningful change to improve an organization’s products, services, processes, and operations and to create new value for the organization’s stakeholders”.

Strategically, Innovation should lead you to a new dimension of business performance. And it has to value add to the organization in terms increased in market share, capturing new customers and higher profit etc. It is not about research into new product or service which cannot be commercialized.

To be effective, organization should set direction and policy pertaining to innovation of product and service to an extent not to discourage such initiatives due to minor failure but to manage such activities to yield maximum results. Innovation should expend into supporting process to ease of doing business with customers

Case Study on Managing for Innovation

Most companies have some form of research and development into new products. To some, they are able to upgrade existing product for better or different applications. The level of focus on Innovation into new products is very much driven by the market or customer requirements. It is seldom in the case where it is done strategically to position ahead of competitors. Perhaps, it is a risk factor to be considered where “Total New” is certainly requires strong courage and good foresights. To play safe, some prefers to be a follower.

On Managing for Innovation, some adopted the “Trial and Error” approach in which innovation is performed based on pass experiences, feedback but existing skill and testing facilities. Investment into new or modern equipment and facilities often an hindrance to advance research and development of new products.

The implication to this approach results in loss of product cycle time thus new product launches is delayed. New product has numerous quality problems. Another aspect of Managing for Innovation is the support services to materialize the new product production. Production process is often taken for granted it can cope with new features of the new product innovated.

So far, innovation is confined to product and services at operation level. Innovation for new business model or business process are not focus point perhaps it has a higher risk to make changes.

Opportunity for Improvement

Organization need to fully understand the needs of the market and customer and predict their future requirement. Use such information to manage innovation for excellent performance. Key indicator to measure such initiatives should be established to monitor the progress and quality of innovations. Value-added measures should be included to measure Return of Investment for new product or services.

Company policies should be set up to encourage innovation. Though failure in innovation should be discourage, it should not have any penalty element in it. Such penalty element in the policy whether written or otherwise would damage innovation.

In summary, you may have noted the way I articulated Managing for Innovation. It merely describe its objectives towards business sense as this is the scope of my article. Having understood the Managing for Innovation in Values and Concepts of Malcolm Baldrige, it should be taken as a strategically for future business advantage. Leaders might benchmark their CEO of Baldrige Winners on their TQM successes in this value. My next article will articulate the next Core Values and Concepts in Managing by Fact

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Disclaimer:
All rights reserved. This article is written by the author based on his practical application experience. All definitions and interpretation of terminology are his point of view and has it has no intention to conflict with experts in similar topic. The author holds no responsibility for the use of this article in any way. Full Baldrige Criteria are available at http://www.nist.gov/quality

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Free to reprint or re-publish:
All rights reserved. You are free to reprint or re-publish this article as long as you include my resource box at the end of this article. And ensure that the URL in the resource box remained intact and it is linked to the author’s website.

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Resource Box: About the Author, LM Foong

The author provides consulting services specializing in TQM Implementations in manufacturing and service sector. He provides facilitation workshops and hands-on application in Cost Reduction and Productivity Improvement projects. He publishes TQM articles, ebooks, case studies, trainer manual and presentation slides. Please click