Vance Kearney on Innovation / 2

 

   Supporting my post on innovation yesterday, I thought I’d share with you some of Vance Kearney from Oracle’s thoughts on this topic.

Vance and I have been having an off-line discussion about this topic following his presentation at the CIPD conference (which I also blogged on).  Although it was an interesting panel, Vance felt that he didn’t get the opportunity to talk about the practical steps that HR practitioners can take to encourage innovation. He’s therefore agreed to let me publish some of our exchange of views.

Here are his thoughts:

Had I been asked what we practitioners including all those in the audience could do,  I would have said encourage the proliferation of shared interest groups and communities around products, services, technologies and processes. Support them with the very best networking and social enterprise tools that you can and also encourage them to meet physically from time to time to share and refine their ideas.

Innovation happens when passionate and interested people are encouraged to share ideas with a shared vision and ambition to create the very best.  Working together ambitiously and passionately is what drives innovation and HR can assist by making the case for the benefits of the social enterprise at the senior management level. 

Creating informal professional communities around shared product, technologies or functions and specialties is a relatively easy thing to do. Using blogs, social networking, conferencing tools can bring people together and its best if its done, by those communities, for those communities, rather than something which is imposed or heavily regulated. 

In this effort HR can encourage managers not to seek to regulate the communities but instead encourage the involvement of employees at every level, not just those with formal responsibilities from the senior levels. In my experience some of the best innovations have come from teams that have not "included" the more senior managers but instead just been given their encouragement and support

HR can champion the social enterprise to create innovation, and it does not need to carry a huge financial cost, it can even save money. Informal networking can be very much more productive than formal agenda  and powerpoint driven meetings and the cost of the tools can be more than offset by reduced travel costs.

Social networking the enterprise is the best way to encourage and create innovation.

 

So there you go.  I just thought these points were worth sharing rather than leaving as part of a personal communication – particularly as I totally endorse them!

 

Picture credit: HR Magazine

Technorati Tags: Vance Kearney,CIPd,conference,innovation,social,networking

 

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