6 Characteristics of Companies Embracing Continuous Innovation

Technological change is happening at an ever-increasing pace.

Four recent studies showcase just how important it is for companies to proactively develop plans that manage and embrace change for their People, Processes and Performance:

• The average lifespan of the S&P 500 is shorter than ever with 75% expected to fall off the list within the next decade
• The pervasiveness of personal mobile devices leads Gartner to predict that 50% of companies will embrace a Bring Your Own Device policy by 2017
• A strong relationship exists between financial performance and effective change management. The best performing organizations manage change four times more effectively that their peers. ³
• 67% of consumers have used a company's social media site for servicing; putting greater pressure on companies to better serve the needs of clients. 

To survive and thrive today, we must be able to transform ourselves, our organizations and our businesses quickly, efficiently, effectively and continuously. Embracing Lean and Agile principles at all levels within an organization and across silos creates a culture of continuous innovation that is now a prerequisite to delivering ongoing value to customers and to the business. 

The following represent six characteristics of companies embracing continuous innovation:

1. Incite action through a compelling vision. Define why change is important to your organization - from the executive level to each employee impacted by the change; create and sustain momentum by creating powerful executive, grassroots, cross-functional and customer support.
2. Create ongoing opportunities for knowledge sharing. One of the keys to organizational agility is providing an environment in which learning is valued and enabled both within specific skill areas and across functional areas. Rather than treating processes as immutable authoritarian documents, establish lightweight processes that serve as a foundational instrument for learning, innovation and sharing. Expect that practices and processes will continuously evolve.
3.  Empower everyone to drive change. Encourage and expect everyone in the organization to actively look for ways to improve and evolve, and to share their innovations with other members of the team. Innovation is a team sport.
4.   Demonstrate success again and again. One of the keys to successfully driving change is demonstrating short-term wins—keeping up a drumbeat of incremental change victories that build towards a larger transformational effort. Agile organizations deliver results in an ongoing series of time-boxed iterations. Even multi-million dollar projects that may take months to complete are delivered on a bi-weekly (or weekly) cadence. Demonstrating short-term successes leads to larger achievements.
5.  Apply lessons learned immediately. Delivering demonstrable value every two weeks means that the company and all stakeholders can reflect and immediately innovate in the next two-week cycle. With this approach, lessons learned are less likely to become “lessons forgotten.”
6.  Optimize the whole. Throughout your transformation and continuous improvement efforts, it’s important to “optimize the whole.” Look at the big picture and not just the successes of one part of the team or one part of the business. To truly optimize the whole, our best practices at CGS include our clients’ processes and persistent collaboration to optimize our total performance—together. 

To learn more, visit CGSinc.com 

Elizabeth Woodward is an Agile Transformation Consultant with CGS, Inc. She has authored numerous papers, articles and a book on Agile methods, transformation and innovation. Elizabeth has presented and/or keynoted at numerous conferences worldwide, including Agile, Innovate, Excellence in Software Engineering, E-learn and CASCON. Elizabeth has coached, trained and enabled hundreds of Fortune 500 teams across industries to continuously improve their practices and processes.  Elizabeth is also a master inventor with more than 20 patents pending and 4 granted