Description

 Harvey Wade – formerly at Cisco , talking about the Innovation Direction

Welcome to the first episode of The People Innovation Podcast . 

Host, Joe Nagle and Mok O’Keeffe catch up after  Mok has just returned from ‘Front End’ a Innovation conference in Boston. One of Mok's big takeaways was from Ivy Ross, Chief Creative at Google Hardware who said  “Fall in love with the problem not the solution”. 

Listen out for:

1. Having a very clearly articulated innovation direction 
2. Developing and investing in the people in the organisation and empowering them
3. Helping people fail and learn from their failure  

Harvey Wade started in the insurance world at Allianz, where his research showed innovative companies make more money. He was part of setting up the innovation team where he set up the programme for employees and built system and spent five years before he moved to a more consulting role, getting experience of innovation of different companies and different sectors - retail, oil and gas. He stated how innovation principles are the same; it is the problems that are different. 

Define what innovation is

• Problem solving to create business value… some may be change, some may be innovation
• You need to be thinking about the future: what does my tomorrow world look like… Where are your burning problems.. 
• When you have an innovation definition, be comfortable to allow your definition to innovate every time 
• Have a clear strategy around what they want to achieve in innovation 

Topics Discussed: 

Harvey works with leaders to think about that balance between sustaining innovation and disrupting innovation, asking what about the future. “We should spend 10% of our time thinking about it, so how do we do that?”

Harvey is trying to help leaders make innovation practical so he has to be visually active with coaching, training, working to do practical things  

Leaders need to encourage those who are thinking of ideas and make examples of them and say it’s OK to try things. 

Harvey also works with a lot of engineers and explains how often they don’t know why they are doing what they are. They just like fixing and jump to the first solution. “You need to understand the problem before you try to fix it. Why does a problem exist? Who does it impact".

Celebrating Innovation 

Harvey discusses ownership of innovation and how the leaders are responsible for the direction. They own the responsibility for innovation and how every individual has a responsibility for it. People who come up with the ideas who are celebrated. 

Harvey also focuses on the people in the group who think ‘I don’t come up with ideas’ but they help make it better’ highlighting how it has got to be a team effort.  

His takeaway: 

"Be aware of the cultural environment to engage people to help them understand what’s in it for them.. People don’t always want cash - they may want a career reward."

Listen to the full episode and email any questions to hello@innovationbeehive.com 

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