How do you get people to create innovative ideas while also pushing the importance of reusing knowledge?
This question came up at the end of APQC’s Knowledge Management (KM) Community Call, a webinar that featured Jean-Claude Monney and Mark Szalkiewics from Microsoft.
Here’s how Mark responded to this tricky—but important—question:
“It’s a struggle, and it’s a push. The innovation system that we have is another program that we drive awareness to. What I found with our innovation system is if someone takes the time to submit an idea, we need to be responsible enough to respond back to them that we’ve received the idea, we’re taking action on the idea, and what’s going to happen to the idea as it progresses.
So every month we have a triage call and I send out a list of all the ideas that are going to be discussed and what stage they’re in in the innovation cycle. I send that out to our community of practice leads and ask them to push that down through their communities and discuss it there. Every community has a Yammer group associated with it. I’ve integrated the innovation system on our Yammer platform, so all dialogue and discussion happens in public inside our community areas. So if we comment on an idea, everybody sees it and can join in. We can track how many comments and posts there are.
In terms of reuse, remember that innovation is not something new—that’s creation. Innovation is taking things that already exist and evolving them—making them better—so that’s what the reuse aspect comes in. Once we decide that an idea is plausible or that we’re interested in it, then we hand it off to the respective CTO in the area and they’ll make the call if they want to fund it or not. And the idea can be funded or not, but if it’s not funded that doesn’t preclude the person from working through it. We’ll help them assemble a dynamic or dedicated team to actually bring that idea to fruition. We can even give them the project manager oversight to help deliver it.”—Mark Szalkiewics, knowledge management lead at Microsoft Americas Enterprise Services