Centers of Excellence enable The Habit of Excellence.
Innovation Day wins are not an accident
On Innovation Day, winning the “best company innovation award” is all about attitude, and the monetary reward in great to receive also. It’s the Habit of Excellence, a product of successful ongoing performance-based employee recognition. Winning on Innovation Day (ID), means an improved process that saves the company money, or a new product helps the company enter a new market generating new profits.
Innovation Day or “ID” is typically a 24-hour annual company event where employees are paid normally, but do projects which they themselves propose as innovations. Employees are encouraged to form ad hoc-teams to solve a problem related to the company’s business, present or future. Weeks prior to “ID” ad hoc teams submit their ideas and mini-business-case to the competition, defined in the company’s ID-rules. In some cases, it might include a working prototype. Variations of this are based on the existing rules-of-the-competition. As companies advance the spirit of their ID-competition, monetary awards are exciting, but only a part of the recognition given to the winning best innovation. With the right training, management leaders can create a rich-culture-of-innovation, and true desire by everyone to continuously improve their company.
Employee Rewards Programs
Employees can receive team awards when their “team meets or exceeds performance goals for a period of time. A goal-based bonus system is based on the achievement of one or more objectives that were set with an individual employee or a team, typically in a “HR annual review process.” These objectives are generally defined over a full year, but can also relate to a particular period. For example, you/HR can set quarterly goals or semestrial goals about sales volume or completing a project. It’s the basic result of “setting MBOs, the Management by Objectives,” as proposed by Peter Drucker in 1981.
An effective employee rewards program will boost morale, show employees they're appreciated and encourage company values. Employee rewarding can take various forms, depending on the company's size, budget and objectives. Incorporating employee rewards is important for showing employees they matter to an organization. Here, we explain the benefits of creating employee rewarding programs, an identify four “simple employee rewards” you can use to boost morale and steps you can take to create a basic employee rewards program.
1. A “certificate of achievement,” given to an employee, recognized by peers for excellence “employee of the month or year award, often includes something monetary.
2. Verbal recognition during a company meeting or in organization-wide communications
3. Visual recognition on a company bulletin board or wall of fame
4. Gift cards or vouchers for stores, restaurants, subscription, spa days or services
5. A free lunch at the restaurant of the employee's choice
Such a program can be defined, budgeted and communicated to employees by HR. And it will reap rewards in morale and performance if done with diligence and empower managers to encourage employees to grow as respected individuals and company citizens.
Evolving Innovation Day winners into increased company profits
We can ask a basic question, “how might a company Innovation-Day-Winner (IDW) evolve into a profitable product or service that fits customer needs?” Let’s start by also asking do you have a marketing-strategy and prototype market-testing processes that are behind the scenes part of the criteria for submitting an idea (ideation) into competition for a company award? This is about connecting the dots towards the profit by innovation, another Habit-of-Excellence. It’s the DNA of innovative, technologically disruptive market leaders. With the right ingredients from SAI6-Accelerate’s LCoE-Training™, managers and employees will grow and fill a place in the company’s Centers of Excellence, and contribute to providing continuous improvement that enables the organization to “lead the field.”
What are Centers of Excellence in a Gen-AI enabled company roadmap?
Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen-AI) is forecasted to have explosive growth for several years. Over 2024 and beyond, we'll see Gen-AI become more useful, with greater transparency around how things work, what they cost, and how best to deploy Gen-AI to create growth experiences. In this way, Gen-AI hype will give way to genuine value. Gen-AI solutions are being marketed today for almost every aspect of business “Start for Free” is the typical message you find on every Gen-AI product website. So, what should one do? Where should one start?
In 2022, Docusign, the 1,000th company in the Fortune 1,000, had revenue of $2 billion. (The Fortune 1,000 is an annual list of the 1,000 largest US companies by revenue.) SMB companies are sometimes defined as having less than 500 employees, and $100-200 Million in revenue. And there are an 33.2 million small businesses of 1-10 employees across America. And from the top 1,000 to the 33 millionth company, they all need to perform with excellence to survive and thrive in this evolving g Gen-AI world. None are immune to needing discipline in execution. We all need to embrace “The Habit of Excellence,” and understand what areas or centers of excellence we need to improve upon.
Developing your staff is a company’s best investment
A flat organizational decision-making system is an environment ripe for culture for innovation development. And great ideas often come from those who work ‘in’ and not ‘on’ the business. Daily, your employes see problems that customers and colleagues have. They are well suited to recognize “how to fix or improve” these problems. Or employes see a gap in the market based on something desired by the consumer.
Digital transformation is an example of technology has evolved over time, to a continuous-integration, continuous-security, continuous-delivery (CI/CD) methodology. This will evolve further as Gen-AI solutions are now capable of writing computer code, and automating test coverage plans. Innovation day ideas are an organic byproduct of the company’s culture.
What if your company can’t justify blocking off a community 24 hours for an Innovation Day? Might a SAI6-Accelerate™ ‘Innovation Sprint Workshop” help evolve your company’s Innovation culture. Preparing for an “Innovation Sprint Day (ISD)” means employee-staff can posts innovation ideas up to a week prior to the event. Then employees can register and choose a team and an idea to work on. The Innovation “sprint day might be a 4-8 time slot in a normal work day. This empowers team building, and can lead to new initiatives for your brand.
Third parties’ awards idea that may go to production
Posting 3rd party competitions for innovation is another path to consider. Many 3rd party organizations have annual competition for the best innovation, such as the Rice Alliance’s annual entrepreneurial award of $350,000 to FluxWorks in 2023.
Concepts successfully pitched at an “Investor Day”, may give the team a small budget to build a prototype, e.g. of a mobile app team to build into the existing company app.
Get the MVP ‘out in the world’, then iterate and get it ‘right’
Creating a Minimal Viable Product MVP version of your innovation day idea is a way to trial its market before your competitors launch something similar. Some brands feel they need to spend time refining until it’s perfect before they launch. Working with SAI6-Accelerate’s LCoE™ Agile methodology can get an MVP version out fast, to test your idea with real users, refine, improve, and implement with much less risk of failure. And, it’s important not to make assumptions of what users may like or dislike, and risks wasting time and valuable resources designing a user interface that doesn’t resonate.
Making an idea better for the end user
It’s essential for a brand to engage consumers and take them along for the journey. The younger audience likes to get involved and the users of an app can be very vocal; embracing this not only improves, but also empowers younger customers to feel valued. Along with conducting face-to-face user testing for the ‘soft launch’, getting feedback from users is invaluable. All this helps continuous improvement up to the time of the target official launch, which should coincide with the company’s marketing campaign.
Design can make all the difference to your new innovation
When market-testing an innovation day idea, you need to ensure it resonates with your customers, gives a great user experience, and works, and it must have ‘its place’ within your brand architecture. Does it reflect brand concepts and existing guidelines?
We learn that leaders listening can generate innovation
Listening to staff from all areas of the business can not only generate remarkable innovations to transform your business, but also makes staff feel more valued. If you employ a large number of Gen Ys (also known as Millennials, a demographic of people born between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s), holding Innovation Days is a great way to encourage their personal growth.
“58% of Gen Y want pathways to personal growth and want this closely tied to recognition initiatives.” - Huff, C, 2006
To reduce possible production problems later on, get everyone who would be impacted involved from the beginning. This will not only help you better estimate the effort, but the wider team might have further ideas on how best to build the new product, or service
Don’t be afraid to iterate and refine tests for your Innovation-Day new product throughout the ideation and build cycles; and ensure your target audience is always centered in your mind. Ensuring your product not only resonates with your audience visually but also functionally (solves a problem) is the best way to ensure its success.
