A Fond Farewell To The Suggestion Box: Disrupting Innovation Management

According to conventional wisdom, small entrepreneurial companies are, by their very nature, agile and innovative. They can turn on a sixpence and put news ideas into operation in a matter of weeks or even days. By instinct, they disrupt markets by seeking out new and better ways of doing things. In contrast, the large, well-established organisation struggles to innovate. With its systems and practices bedded-in over decades, change is something that tends to happen painfully slowly.

It's a caricature, of course. Large organisations can be slow in implementing change but that doesn't mean they are disinterested in innovation. At one level, boards know that improved internal processes create efficiencies that ultimately feed through to the bottom line. Equally important, in the age of the challenger brand, businesses in all sectors know that resting on their laurels isn't an option. If they can't, for example, keep up with customer expectations then smaller, disruptive competitors will move in and gleefully shave off slices of market share.

Why Is Change So Difficult

So here's the question. If large organisations are keen to innovate why do they find at so difficult?  Perhaps one reason is that once a business hits a certain size it becomes increasingly difficult to harvest and assess the ideas generated by members of staff.

Think of it this way. From car factories to supermarket floors, the people who work day-in and day- out with existing business processes can probably pinpoint dozens of small inefficiencies that make working life just a little bit more difficult while also acting as a drag on performance. Those same people can probably suggest how things might be improved.

So they make suggestions to line managers who either 'mentally file' the proposal or on a good day mention it at the next brainstorming session. The problem is that no one owns the process of filtering the suggestions and implementing the best of them. Consequently they are forgotten.

Certainly that's the view of Wazoku, a UK-based tech company  company offering software tools to enable large organisations to collect, manage and put into practice ideas proposed by members of staff and managers. Founded in 2011, the company was named as one of Britain's top 50 must disruptive startups by business lender Everline in 2013 and has also been hailed as a leading player in innovation management by Gartner . Last week Wazoku published a new report – Everyday Innovation – highlighting some of the innovation challenges that major companies face.

Throwing Ideas Away

According to the report – based on a poll of companies employing an average of 5,200 people - British businesses are typically throwing away around 1,800 ideas every year. Meanwhile, the average employee is contributing around 6 ideas a year. Overall, less than half (43%) of the ideas proposed will be taken forward.

Wazoku says the problem is a lack process, coupled with a failure to create an environment where employees are encouraged to contribute.

So what can a young British software company do to turn around the innovation record of well-established businesses? Well, as CEO and co-founder Simon Hill acknowledges, Wazoku is not a consultancy or professional services firm. In other words, it won't be sending in teams of consultants to ring changes. “What we do is provide the software that allows organisations to bring some formal process to innovation initiatives across the organisation," he says.

In practice this typically involves managers deciding on priority problems and inviting staff to table their own solutions which are collected and collated via the Wazoku system. Staff can make suggestions via office workstations or through software apps downloaded onto their own devices, such as tablets, phones or laptops.

Supermarket group Waitrose already uses the system and as Operational Improvement Manager Stuart Eames notes, the ability to post ideas from external devices is particularly important when staff don't have regular or easy access to in-house systems. “And what we find is people are posting ideas at lunchtime and from home,” he says.

As Eames sees it, the holy grail is an idea that scales up. For instance, a simple proposal on stacking carrots to them easier to bring out from the storeroom to the main store may mean a small improvement in efficiency at one or two locations. On the other hand, an idea that can be rolled out in every store – such as a reduction in the time spent processing transactions – can feed through to massive savings.  At branch level, it might be difficult to identify the ideas that will scale up. The Wazoku system, brings suggestions from far flung reaches of the organisation to the decision making center.

Innovation Culture

Of course, this twenty first century take on the suggestion box depends for its success in members of staff being persuaded to spend time and energy coming up with innovative ideas. This can be achieved through financial incentives, but Hill argues that is not the prime motivator. “You can build in cash incentives but most people are not after that. “What we're seeing is a young working culture in which people are willing to put ideas into the process as a way of having a voice and building career.”

Four years into its Journey, Wazoku has names such as Prudential Insurance, the BBC, Aviva and Waitrose on its client list and is expanding into the US. It's an example of a young, innovative company that is exporting its ideas to large organisations that are hungry for change.