Shared Secrets – Entry #9: Where did we put all those intentions?

This is the ninth in the series on managing collaborative innovation. Click here for the Beginning of the Series

Every company collects and manages intellectual property in different ways. And just as with inventions, there is no single way to manage intentions (see earlier posts in this series about inventions versus intentions). There are methods that attempt to gather written-down intentions, but each of these runs into different problems. The most common problem is the same one that prevents most people from maintaining a good to-do list – even the tiny amount of time and effort required to write things down is often just too much for a busy person to bear.

It helps to piggy-back intention management on activities that are already required and accepted. In some companies, the best that can be done is to add intention details to the invention disclosure process. A common related activity that extends beyond inventors filing patents would be employees lodging their key performance indicators (aka, personal business commitments). Many firms have deployed online portals for employees to manage their performance commitments, their vacation schedules, their 401k, and other details. If the portal asks the right questions when the employee is filling out performance commitments, that information is a ready-made set of employee-driven data on emerging intentions. In order for this to work, though, there must be an opportunity for the employee to list not only what they commit to do but what they would intend to do if given the chance – even if they know it is outside their current responsibilities. And for this to work, the option to lodge these intentions anonymously is crucial.

Regular innovation events of various kinds are an accepted part of the culture in some firms and can be a means for collecting large sets of intentions. A variety of online tools that are available for managing these events could be modified to collect intentions as well. IBM’s WorldJam, for example, started as an online internal idea “festival” and has now been extended to include partners, customers and other external parties. Best Buy and other companies maintain programs where anyone in the firm who wants to have a chance to start something new can get a small amount of time and resource to try it.

All methods must be painstakingly tailored for an organization’s unique culture, and even then they only paint part of the picture. The very best managers and executives use their sense of small moves occurring throughout their organization as a key indicator of emerging intent. They give employees from the top to the bottom of the company specific levels of autonomy and see what they do with it. This can be formalized into venture funds, incubators, programs like Royal Dutch Shell’s Gamechanger and IBM’s Extreme Blue initiatives. Or they can be as limited as a $1000 discretionary travel budget. The key is ensuring that the trend data from all these sources get to the right decision-makers.

Click here for the Previous Entry.

[click here for entry #10.]

Advertisement