Sustainable innovation management – what can we learn from small user dominated companies to boost the innovation management process in larger companies?

MOTIVATION
For companies finding the next big idea and turning it into the next big hit has become even more essential in recent years. For that purpose, companies established internal innovation management processes (IMP). By using a bottom-up approach the management often hopes to unlock unused potential of the employees and to spark new creative ideas. However, it appears that after the implementation of an innovation process (IP), the quantity and overall quality of the ideas submitted by the employees decreases over time.

OBJECTIVES
Together with a large German company in the public transport industry, a study was conducted to identify the root causes of this development. Recently the company has introduced a new internal IMP where employees are empowered to submit their own ideas. The involvement of the employees was extremely high right after the implementation of the process, but then decreased rapidly over time. When talking to other companies the same phenomenon was observed. In first interviews it was found that this was not caused by a lack of novel ideas as employees still developed and implemented innovative so-called submarine projects by using unofficial pass-ways within the companies. Hence, rather than a lack of innovative ideas, there is a lack of motivation to participate in the official IP by the employees.
This study explores the motivation gap discovered within various German companies. Which factors cause this decline in employee participation in the IP and which measures have to be taken to prevent it?

THEORY
Many studies have been conducted on the described phenomenon and a variety of recommendations have been developed, e.g. an improved company culture or a reward system, which is not based on materialistic or financial means. Other studies suggested a broader support by the management or an easier und tool-supported IP.

METHODS
After understanding the problem in the company of public transportation and discovering the same issue at many other companies, recommendations for the optimization of the IP were extracted from the literature. The results were clustered and recommendations for different groups of companies were developed. In workshops, the participating companies turned most of the recommendations down, as they already had implemented most of them in the recent past.
A new approach was to look into start-ups and young established companies, as most of them do not have the described issues. Especially employees of young companies, which already have an established IP, are happy to use the process and follow often very complicate procedures to reach their innovation goals.

FINDINGS
Interviewing the large companies, it was found, that the central issues are not the process design, the usability of the IT-system or the lack of free time to work on innovations, which were some of the recommendations extracted from the literature at the beginning of the project. The fields of action identified rather lied in the area of the overall company culture, the communication and most importantly the competencies of the employees. After the identification of those fields of actions, solutions were developed looking into start-ups or young companies which are dominated by users, sometimes even former customers and their needs. Based on these results, recommendations for the larger companies, depending on the industry, company history, company size and organization structure, were developed to optimize the motivation of the employees to participate in the companies IP system.