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Toying with new ideas

By Frans Nauta - posted Tuesday, 2 January 2007


To give you an idea of the impact of this “Culture of Innovation”: one researcher, working on a new type of glue, ended up with a messy, sticky substance that simply wouldn't dry up. He shared this failure with his colleagues. One of them was a singer in a church choir. He figured out that sticky glue that never dried would be a great solution for the page markers that kept falling out of his songbooks during concerts. After testing that successfully he came up with the small yellow sticky notes that can be found in every business and household.

Now let's take that example to the public sector. Learning requires in many cases admitting failure, but there are not many politicians willing to do that. Likewise, civil servants are hardly rewarded for taking on risky projects. For career driven people it's much more important not to make mistakes.

This attitude is hard to change. A good start would be to see new policies as experiments, explicitly state in discussions with parliament and the media that innovation inherently involves risk, pre-define the risks involved and create a feedback process to evaluates the results and promise “aggressive learning” if the experiment fails.

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How about Shell and its Gamechanger-program? Big companies are not that different from government organisations in the sense that they have many management layers, a lot of formal rules and are dominated by the daily routine.

Within big organisations it's very hard to get good ideas from the bottom to the top, not to mention getting it from the top down to the bottom again.

An inspired idea of a new possibility at the bottom of the organisation loses most of its originality and edge on the way up. Shell's management knows that if it can't tap into the knowledge and ideas of its people in its daily operations, the company has a serious problem. So it set up a program to get radical ideas from everybody inside (and even outside) the organisation and created a high speed track for those ideas.

Let's say that you have a radical idea for Shell. You can submit that to the Gamechanger-program via a website. A small team that reports directly to the CEO Jeroen van der Veer assesses the potential. If they like your idea you have a meeting with them two weeks after your submission. If they like you they will give you budget to further develop your idea into a “proof of concept”.

Depending on how promising and big the idea is, the Gamechanger-people will bring you to the right executive people directly and you get a chance to pitch. Shell puts around 45 million euros into the Gamechanger program every year, about 10 per cent of its total R&D budget. One of the strongest indications that it's working: middle management hates it.

It wouldn't be hard to set up a Gamechanger-equivalent in the public sector. If you're a politician or public manager, create a way for the really smart civil servants to escape from the formal hierarchy that you are responsible for. Find a way to select the best ideas, invite the people directly to your table, give them a budget to test those ideas and support them during the testing. There are a lot of entrepreneurial minds working in the public sector, but we hardly have ways to tap into them.

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There are also a lot of creative minds among the customers of LEGO. The company came up with a brilliant way to get those minds working for its business. It created LEGO Factory, software that anyone can use to create a new LEGO-model. When you're finished designing your model you can order the right LEGO-pieces with one mouse click and get it sent to your home.

The company didn't stop there. It opened up the possibility for other LEGO-fans to order those self-made models. It even promised to bring the ten most popular models into its retail channels. The designers receive a percentage of the revenue.

Now how about the government giving a tool like this to its citizens? What would it look like? We could start with a city website where people can create or post their idea for their neighborhood and let visitors select the top ten.

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Frans Nauta spoke at a public sector innovation Eidos breakfast seminar on December 13, 2006 in Brisbane. A shorter version of this article was first published in The Courier-Mail on December 13, 2006.



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About the Author

Frans Nauta (www.nauta.org) is a professor of Innovation at HAN University in The Netherlands. He worked as secretary of innovation at the Dutch Prime Ministers office, worked with companies like Shell, Philips and founded a thinktank on the knowledge economy.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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