Following with the previous article on the key attitudes for building a culture of innovation, this is to explain the strategies that make innovation thrive within the organization. First of all, leaders have to be committed, walk their talk, encourage risk-taking and unconventional thinking, and push people to explore beyond their comfort zone. The leaders’ behavior is the main key success factor in the development of a new culture, as they shape others’ behaviors. Many strategies can contribute in building an innovative culture:

Embracing innovation at the leadership level. Assume that innovation is a key driver of the corporate strategy that needs to be fostered throughout the organization. Reflect on attitudes to promote or to change for the leaders to engage management levels.

Identifying new potential leaders. Look for individuals who already act, to some extent, as network brokers and improve their coaching and leadership skills so they can further improve the performance of other people involved in innovation tasks. Give them recognition and further empowerment to lead innovation projects to set an example for the rest.

Creating opportunities for quick success. Especially at the beginning, it is good to have some innovation projects which are likely to be successful in the short term, so as to make people see positive results and boost engagement. A first positive experience is critical to get them involved in an innovative culture.

Providing a sense of empowerment. Everybody needs to know that it is encouraged to question current practices and to bring in fresh new ideas, for which they are to be rewarded. Ultimately, listening to a wider range of insights than you normally hear is the key to promoting original thinking. Everybody’s contribution should be welcome.

Defining the innovation goals and strategy. Choose the innovation that drives growth and helps meet strategic objectives, communicating clearly the expected outcomes. When senior executives ask for innovation in the gathering of consumer insights, the delivery of services, or the consumer experience, they tell employees the type of innovation they expect.

Setting innovation performance metrics. Performance indicators should encompass mainly financial and behavioral metrics. They can also set metrics to foster outsourcing ideas, like requiring a minimum of ideas from outer sources or other innovation friendly behaviors.

Designing innovation networks. Since new ideas spur more new ideas, networks generate a cycle of innovation. By focusing on getting the most from innovation networks, leaders can therefore capture more value from existing resources. Decentralizing networks enhances collaboration and performance for the innovation challenges.

Creating a culture of originality. Many people are capable of creating new ideas, although they need the right environment to do so. By giving employees opportunities and incentives to generate new ideas and setting a meritocratic system, considering the top performers’ opinion for the evaluation of new ideas, organizations boost their innovation performance.

Cultivating cohesion and dissent. Make dissent one of your organization’s core values. Create an environment where people can openly share critical opinions and are respected for doing so. Despite sounding contradictory, a combination of the two is what brings novel ideas to the table while keeping enough harmony in the organization to facilitate cooperation.

Prioritizing organizational values. Give people a framework for choosing between conflicting opinions and allowing the best ideas to win out. Values need to be rank-ordered so that when employees face choices between competing options, they know what goes first.

Leveraging incoming talent. Empower and encourage new hires to challenge “the company way”, so as to bring a new perspective. Their experience may bring in new ideas and approaches, and also contribute to broaden other employees’ mind. It is interesting to hire talent coming not only from competitors but also from other innovative industries.

Mentoring participants to broaden their mind. Innovative thinking requires open mindset to start. This is not only necessary for the innovators themselves, but also for the rest of the organization, to prevent them from becoming innovation anti-champions and sabotage innovation efforts. This mentoring is to make them consider innovation positive for them too.

Educating in the tolerance to failure. Embracing failure is an unavoidable step to succeed in any venture, and so it is for the innovation efforts. Many cultures regard failure as a shameful fact in the performance track record, but organizations focused on and successful with their innovation efforts embrace failure as a natural part of the process.

Creating an incentive system. This is a key strategy to creating trust and engagement. It should not only reward all participants according to their contribution, but also create a framework to build contributors’ reputation, which is eventually taken into account when choosing the appropriate team members for certain projects or to decide upon promotions.

Manage innovation inhibitors. Fear of failure, vertical hierarchy, mistrust and fearful environment, rewarding short-term performance over long-term oriented plans, closeness to new approaches are –among others- cultural attributes that prevent innovation from thriving. Incentive systems oriented towards these behaviors are usually one of the main inhibitors.

Beyond the strategies to create a culture of innovation, leaders need to bear in mind that the key mindsets to build such culture are trust and engagement. As Steven Covey noted, “trust is not some soft, illusive quality that you either have or you don’t; rather, trust is a pragmatic, tangible, actionable asset that you can create –much faster than you probably think possible”. Developing and nurturing trust within your organization is likely to lead to more efficiency, improved teamwork and a better work environment. There are many courses of action that may contribute to building trust among the members of the organization:

Demonstrate trust through employee empowerment. Articulating the corporate values is necessary, but consistently living those values by walking your talk is what actually builds trust. Empowering employees is an actionable and impactful way to show your trust in them.

Commit to transparency and communication. Honest and open communication also helps in building trust. Be sure that your organization has an effective way to share information with employees and be transparent with them as well when they demand it.

Create systems for failure. You want your employees to be active and take initiative. So long as failures are unavoidable at some point, it is important that those who take initiative do not fear it, but rather take the opportunity to learn from every failure to leap forward.

Apart from trust, engagement is another key mindset to develop in order to reach high performance, both in terms of innovation outcomes and in the overall results.

This article is from the Whitepaper “Building a culture of collaboration and innovation” written by Jordi Pera, Founder and CEO at Envisioning Tourism 3.0 Ltd. You may download for free the full Whitepaper at www.envisioningtourism.com/whitepapers

Besides the building of a collaborative culture, destinations 3.0 need also to create a culture of innovation, where not only openness to new ideas is a key shared value, but also the aim for integrating new concepts and approaches into the model is encouraged and all stakeholders are empowered to participate in the innovation process. Managers and employees broadly agree about the values and behaviors that foster innovation.

In accordance with our research, the top attitudes are openness to new ideas and a willingness to experiment and take risks. In an innovative culture, people know that their ideas are valued and believe that it is safe to express them and act on those ideas, and to learn from failure. Leaders reinforce this state of mind by involving employees in decisions that matter to them.

It is broadly thought as well that organizations usually have the right talent or most of what they need, but that the corporate culture is the main inhibitor that prevents them from innovating. Defining and creating the right kind of culture is therefore a must to increase the prospects for successful and sustained innovation.

The top two motivators that promote innovation within an organization are strong leaders who encourage and protect it, and top executives who spend their time actively managing and driving it. Further, an innovation friendly organization should rather have a horizontal hierarchy, allowing all employees and partners to easily access leaders, who are to inspire and influence them through role modelling as disruptive innovators to open their mindsets towards a new set of attitudes:

Questioning by allowing them to challenge the usual assumptions and the status quo to consider new possibilities: What has changed with our stakeholders, or the world at large? What assumptions are we still making about our business that may no longer be valid”?

Observing how things work in other kinds of businesses, which opens your mind to new possibilities. It also enables you to spot new patterns and connections that others might not see – a critical factor for successful innovation.

Networking and permitting to gain radically different perspectives from individuals with diverse industry or cultural backgrounds. Connecting with different realities is critical to open one’s mindset, and this is a necessary step towards fostering an innovative culture.

Experimenting and testing new ideas. Resisting time pressure for quick solutions is the first step, so it is better to think about new solutions before time is pressing. Once the underlying assumptions are challenged, it’s time to try new combinations and procedures.

Associational Thinking— drawing connections between questions, problems, or ideas from unrelated fields—is triggered by questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting, and is the catalyst for creativity.

Beyond these key attitudes to ingrain in order to foster innovation, an upcoming blogpost is to explain the key strategies to deploy in order to make that happen.

This article is from the Whitepaper “Building a culture of collaboration and innovation” written by Jordi Pera, Founder and CEO at Envisioning Tourism 3.0 Ltd. You may download for free the full Whitepaper at www.envisioningtourism.com/whitepapers

“The social networks potential to turn every citizen into an agent for the improvement of the community is huge” says Alfons Cornella –Spanish Innovation leader- in his book “The solution starts by CO”.

During the last few years it has become fashionable that destinations outsource part of their promotion activities to visitors and local community members. In what could be called co-creation processes, many destination management and promotion bodies have decided to celebrate public elections to select their logos and slogans. In this election there is first a period to receive proposals, and at the end of this period the public election takes place.

At first it may sound very open and transparent. So long as both the logo and the slogan are to become key elements of the destination image, it is good that everybody can express their opinion about it. However, this system may entail some risks. Those who vote probably choose their vote according to purely esthetic criteria, without considering aspects related with the value promise of the destination, or its desired positioning, the targets, etc. As a result of these processes there have been some bad experiences.

The main issue is that the chosen logo and/or slogan should be in accordance with the destination strategy, which is usually defined in a Strategy Plan according to the destination leaders’ criteria. It is therefore necessary to introduce a filtering phase either before or after the public election, to discard all those logos and slogans that do not match with the destination strategy.

In Spain there has been mainly one experience of this kind, in the Basque Country, driven by the Bilbao City Council and the Bizkaia Province Government. These two institutions had been collaborating for a long time, up to the point that they shared a stand in the FITUR Tourism Fair under the brand BI2. In this way, they wanted to leverage the power of the Bilbao brand to favor also the rest of the Province, so long as the Bizkaia brand is far behind in terms of awareness, despite the worthy resources it has. Bilbao, in turn, has experienced a transformation thanks to the Guggenheim effect and the public-private collaboration, which has led to a sustained visitors’ growth in the city.

Deepening in this collaboration line, they have launched a contest to select their new common logo and slogan. In this case, they opened a public contest for professionals under a detailed briefing. As a result of this idea contest, they received up to 84 proposals from 7 different countries. They were all exposed to the public, though the first selection process was carried out by a commission of experts to present 10 final proposals to be voted for by the public. To facilitate participation, they have installed 6 voting points to let locals vote for their favourite choice.

However, the citizens’ votes will count for only 20% of the final decision. The rest will be responsibility of the experts committee led by Garry White, President of the European Cities Marketing Association.

What do you thing about letting the locals vote for strategic decisions of high symbolic value?

As explained many times in this blog, engaging customers and turning them into fans, contributors and brand ambassadors is one of the key success factors of destinations 3.0. One recent case within the entertainment sector showcases how co-innovation with fans can lead to fruitful results.

Even if the concept of costumer centric business is still often more of a marketing trick or organizational aspiration than a reality, increasing competition is making brands truly getting closer to customers. Some others are even going further: they are putting them at the heart of business decision-making.

When it comes to innovation they’re even asking them for help with the process, not just simply using them to provide insight. Consumer-led creativity does exist. Consumers are a huge and largely untapped source of creativity and innovation. Customers are already creating value and solving problems without any encouragement from commercial organizations. Why not trying to tap into it?

Co-creation workshops can help businesses pool ideas from participants and turn these insights into tangible prototypes that can be evaluated in real time. We could recently prove it once more when asked by F.C. Barcelona to lead its first co-creation workshop with members of the football club in order to work together in a process of proposals and ideas. Using the context of the recent Mobile World Congress, fifty F.C. Barcelona supporters between 18 and 40 years gathered in a workshop named ‘Smart & Mobile Connection Future’ to propose ideas linked to technological applications that could facilitate the living and sensing of everything the sport club is offering to its members, supporters and fans in the stadium and sports events.

After a few speeches introducing the vision, mission and methodology of the workshop by some innovation experts, the supporters were divided into small groups to encourage their participation, which resulted in a great deal of ideas related to the use of new technologies in the Stadium and the sporting events. Contributions and needs identified were numerous. For instance, it was proposed to make possible to watch game replays on the phone or tablet at the Camp Nou stadium itself in real time; and apps to order sandwiches and drinks from seats during the game or to access to information about public transport and traffic around the stadium. Some other proposals pointed to be able to carry a digital version club’s member card in smartphones that could also be used for mobile payments at shops and restaurants linked with F.C. Barcelona.

Co-creation workshop ‘Smart & Mobile Connection Future’ is part of a transversal innovation program started late last year with the aim to identify problems and opportunities for the organization and resolve them through new projects or ways of working. Some other workshops like this are coming soon and will be related to other areas of the club.

As it has been explained in the posts about destination models 3.0, these intend to leverage the intelligence, creativity, initiative and influential power of all its stakeholders from the outset, not only in product and content co-creation, but also up to the business model innovation. In this regard, considering the Destination Management Organisation (DMO) as the destination’s government from the planning and management perspective, some governments are developing innovative practices in this direction, which should inspire also the destinations’ governance organisations.

Some governments are trying to lessen political apathy by engaging citizens in crowdsourcing initiatives for a variety of areas of innovation and decision taking on public affairs. But besides the attempt to prevent further public institutions disaffection, those governments tapping into the knowledge and abilities of citizens are also discovering the benefits to reach beyond the usual experts to expand and diversify the talent pool tackling a problem.

U.S Government and more specifically Obama administration has been especially active in government-driven crowdsourcing competitions and collaborations. Across government, all sorts of agencies are implementing hundreds of crowdsourcing approaches, citizen science programs, and other efforts that have brought the best ideas and talent together to solve mission-centric problems. Last year alone, Federal agencies ran over 85 prize competitions, from small-dollar prizes to winnings of $100,000 or more.

The Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program brings the innovation economy into government, by pairing talented, diverse technologists and innovators with top civil-servants and change-makers within the federal government to tackle some our nation’s biggest challenges.
This program brings the principles, values, and practices of the innovation economy into government through the most effective agents of change we know: our people. This highly-competitive program pairs talented, diverse technologists and innovators with top civil-servants and change-makers working at the highest levels of the federal government to tackle some our nation’s biggest challenges. These teams of government experts and private-sector doers take a user-centric approach to issues at the intersection of people, processes, products, and policy to achieve lasting impact.

Fellows selected for this unique, and highly-competitive opportunity serve for 12 months, during which they will collaborate with each other and federal agency partners on high-profile initiatives aimed at saving lives, saving taxpayer money, fueling job creation, and building the culture of entrepreneurship and innovation within government. As stated in its website, PIF offers to talented individuals from diverse backgrounds “the unique opportunity to work on truly awesome projects with the potential to make a positive impact, with a user base of more than 300 million Americans.”

About the Fellowship

The Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program was established by the White House in 2012 to attract top innovators into government, capable of tackling issues at the convergence of technology, policy, and process.

The PIF program is administered as a partnership between the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the General Services Administration (GSA). In 2013, the PIF program established a permanent home and program office within GSA.

Program Details

The Fellowship is a 12-month program, during which Fellows are embedded within a federal agency to collaborate on challenges with innovators inside government. Fellows are based in Washington D.C. for the duration of their Fellowship, and are considered full-time employees of the federal government.

Fellows operate with wide latitude for individual initiative in planning and executing solutions to problem, and spend a significant portion of their time co-working and collaborating with other Fellows. Throughout the program, Fellows receive support from partners in the White House and change-agents across various federal agencies.

Created in 2012, opportunities for Fellows participating in the program have already include creating new crowdsourcing tools to empower survivors and first responders during natural disasters, significantly improving the quality of US patent system, or even addressing asteroid threats to human populations. Fellows have also unleashed the power of open government data to spur the creation of new products and jobs; designed pilot projects that make it easier for new economy companies to do business with the Federal Government; and much more. These are some of many other resultant projects:

Collaborative innovation is one of the key concepts that set Destinations 3.0 apart from others, and one of the main sources of competitive advantage. Singapore –the second most competitive economy worldwide according to the World Competitiveness Index- is an example of best practices in collaborative innovation between the public and private sector.

The Singapore Government launched about five years ago a Public Private Co-Innovation Partnership (CI Partnership) programme to encourage the co-development of innovative solutions with the private sector to meet the government’s longer term needs. The initiative was inspired by part of the recommendations of the Singapore Ministry of Finance Economic Strategies Committee (ESC) in which it was included the idea that Co-Innovation would be a new growth path for companies.

The programme involves the Government committing $450m over 5 years to fund such collaborations. For each of these projects, companies interested in co-developing solutions with the Government can apply for funding to do so.

The CI Partnership works on a public-private problem-based approach to innovation. Public agencies first define Government’s needs where there are no identified “off-the-shelf” solutions. Interested companies can then submit their proposals and ideas for projects to the agencies. Depending on the project, promising proposals can be funded to test the feasibility of the concept, develop prototypes or to test-bed the solution.

Interested companies can log on to the co-innovation website at http://www.coinnovation.gov.sg in which is possible to read Government explanation for the programme:

“Today, in an increasingly complex environment, Government faces many challenges and needs that do not have existing solutions. Singapore companies have the innovation potential to meet those needs. The central idea behind the CI Partnership is that Government can better serve the public through innovations borne out of public-private partnership”.

Tourism Destinations 3.0 base one of their main competitive advantages in the power of leveraging the stakeholders’ collective intelligence through open innovation, taking advantage of the stakeholders’ motivation for contribution to the destination’s mission, to address some of the community’s social and environmental challenges. This example illustrates how other international bodies tackling global challenges try to leverage the motivation for contribution to the greater good through open innovation.

UNICEF is hoping to do more to help the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people thanks to a new open innovation initiative. The United Nation program for children recently launched CauseTech looking for unique alternative solutions to propel their work forward. This dedicated global community site will enable participants to share ideas, vote and discuss refinements.

CauseTech aims to aggregate the world’s best and brightest innovators, technologists, IT professionals, product developers, researchers, entrepreneurs, academics and post-graduate students in a global open innovation ecosystem. The new portal is part of a new private sector initiative to crowdsource breakthrough ideas, inventions, products, and emerging technologies that can advance the work done by the UNICEF Global Innovation Center worldwide. The CauseTech website features novel technologies and solutions that serve as inspirations for the community moving through the ideation process. These technologies are also profiled for crowdsourced discussion through the ideation platform.

The aim is tap collective thinking and input to identify, adapt and deploy inventive technology solutions that can help UNICEF scale its efforts to meet the ever-growing needs of the poorest and most vulnerable and excluded children across 190 countries. This includes health, drinking water, renewable energy, food security, hygiene, education, communication, and self-sufficiency.

CauseTech.Net will register and profile contributors and run crowdsourcing contests and challenges developed by UNICEF offices. Once registered, community members can submit ideas and technologies to solve a need and/or take part in one of the global challenges. UNICEF also wants this new platform to engage with mentors, other innovators, and potential partners and collaborators in order to improve upon potential new successful ideas, therefore becoming the connector between all the relevant actors in the value chain to ensure innovative solutions can be successfully implemented and scaled across regions and contexts.

While the platform will enable ongoing open ideation around challenges, it will also run timed contests curated by UNICEF Innovation teams. The first official contest was launched last June through UNICEF’s Burundi Innovation Lab. This challenge focus on alternative energy solutions for this country, where only three percent of the population is connected to the electricity grid. The aim is to accelerate product development and market expansion while building local entrepreneurship and testing a new hybrid public-private partnership.

UNICEF has already experienced the positive benefits of private-public partnerships. The United Nation organization hope private sector partners will use the new platform to provide funding for crowdsourced innovation challenges besides engaging their smart minds in solving real-world problems UNICEF workers are facing in the field. As declared in the “Q&A” section of the new platform,

“We are seeing a shift in private sector companies away from competition and towards collaboration. Companies see that by pulling in the resources and strengths of different groups, they can really extend their value proposition. This is the same in the social sector. We realize that we cannot achieve everything on our own, and while we are experts in development we don’t necessarily have the technological background to ensure the best solutions can be found and scaled. The goal of CauseTech is to expand the sphere of how we look at private public partnerships so that we can really go beyond philanthropy and move towards engagement.

We believe that for the global challenges we are addressing, the solutions are out there.

As explained in many previous blogposts, the Open innovation system is one of the key features that set destinations 3.0 apart from competitors. One of the outcomes of the innovation system is the generation of ideas for improving competitiveness at all levels: product, cluster and cross-destination.

Further, it is important to remember that the Monitoring system is to gather information that eventually should help in determining competitiveness improvement priorities and orientating improvement direction. This information is obtained as a result of the following research goals:

Tourists’ needs, problems, and concerns in view of identifying insecurities and discomforts to be addressed through improvement or development of new services and facilities.

Tourists’ motivations and concerns to sense the convenience of developing new products or mission driven tourism activities.

Tourists’ opinions to pre-test ideas on new products or marketing initiatives, to ensure their viability and adequate development.

Beyond these outcomes, both the open innovation and monitoring system are flexible and so permanently open to add new features and activities to tackle new challenges in the most appropriate way, and so the variety of outcomes may increase constantly. The Whitepaper “Envisioning Open Innovation in destinations” is to explain further details on these issues.

How else do you think that the Open Innovation could contribute to enhance competitiveness?

Beyond customization right before or during the experience, co-creation may take place in many different ways:

Co-creation workshops, organized as a creative and educational activity open to all stakeholders, which in turn may provide valuable ideas to develop products.

Product development contests, organized to promote contribution to the open innovation system providing elaborated ideas on how to develop new life-changing experiences.

Ideation bank contributions, permanently accessible as a section of the open innovation system, where innovation needs are posted, and solutions are submitted and voted.

Product Manager’s creation based on inputs from creative reviews and new stories, permanently inspiring and nurturing the marketers’ creativity.

Local service supplier creation based on own creativity, inputs from reviews and stories, and the technical support of the Product Manager.

The Product co-creation workshops play a critical role as both educational and productive events. There, Product Managers explain the product development process and the key success factors for creating life-changing experiences according to the destination’s mission. The workshops educate the attendants in the art of ideation and team working to generate and refine ideas leveraging all group members’ creativity.

Attendance should be mandatory for local DMC like the micro-entrepreneurs from the base of the pyramid, but also the participation of all other community stakeholders should be encouraged. Other interesting targets could be school students as part of their education, members of mission driven organizations such as NGO, etc.

Beyond the explained details of the four prototypes, there may be many other added value experiences to support the main one in fostering its popularity and conveying new contributions both in virtual and real world platforms. Some of these story related experiences could be video games (in the case of the prototypes 3 and 4 the video game is an essential component), comic based stories, theater plays, board games, movies, spin-off stories, merchandise products, etc. This is actually what film series such as Harry Potter, Star Wars or Lord of the rings have done to some extent, trying to satisfy the desires of their followers for more story related experiences.

With regards to the crowd game driven experiences, the environmental challenges would be driven by volunteers, usually entailing some kind of field work to achieve a certain goal in relation with the environment protection in the form of a game driven experience to make it more fun and stimulating. In the case of the creativity & cooperation challenge, it would be driven by contributors willing to prove their creative skills, in the form of a game driven experience where participants also have to prove teamwork capacity by solving one or more innovation challenges related with the mission purpose, which also serves as an educational experience in collaborative innovation. Finally, the educational fun experience is for tourists willing to entertain while taking away some significant learning outcomes related to skill development or social consciousness, for instance.

In the case of contributors in creativity & cooperation challenges and also in the case of story making contributors, there should be a system that not only facilitates but also rewards contributors based on a reputation and incentive system, in order to stimulate talented followers to bring in their passion and imagination to build the story world. This is not only crowd sourcing but also providing the audience members an opportunity to live a life-changing experience by exploiting their skills. The Whitepaper “Envisioning Open innovation in destinations” is to further develop the idea of the incentive and reputation system for contributors.

Do you envision other story innovation concepts to enhance the aforementioned ideas or to inspire new story based experiences?