School Age Care: Company General Use

Final Assignment Reflection – Learning Lunch

Challenge

I am responsible for my department’s innovation and patent development program, as well as  being the main consultant for the admin area.  My responsibility in to ensure that my  department with 275 employees meets the corporate targets for employee participation and  idea implementation.  Likewise, I have to ensure that the subject matter experts from sister  departments under the same admin area follow the same innovation requirements.  At a  department level, the biggest challenge is to follow up with idea owners on the implementation  of their approved ideas.  On the other hand, at the admin area level with 6800+ employees, the  challenge is to ensure that other innovation subject matter experts (SMEs) align with my  innovation program and follow best practices.  There is a total of 10 operating departments  within our admin area.   In theory, corporate key performance measures are to be achieved by  end of year but do to our outstanding performance over the past 3 years, our management is  requesting these same targets to be achieved by mid-year.  In order to achieve these goals, we  have launched an awareness plan which will promote and cultivate the innovation culture from  our employees.  This will ensure that employee idea submission goals are attained way ahead  of schedule in order to focus all efforts in idea implementation for the remaining of the  calendar year.

Selection

The department goals are personally managed by me but the admin area goals require closer  follow up and execution by admin area innovation subject matter experts.  I have put together  an awareness session calendar where in collaboration with each of the operating department  SMEs, we will host awareness/brainstorming sessions to promote innovation and idea  generation.  We began in the month of February and we will continue to conduct two sessions  per operating department within a calendar year.

Application

As part of the first awareness/brainstorming session, we focus on the innovation process.  We  cover the subjects of idea generation, advocacy and screening, experimentation,  implementation and commercialization.  We have a corporate innovation portal for open idea  submission.  Our employees struggle with structuring their conceptual ideas and often don’t  follow through and end up abandoning an idea that can potentially generate huge benefits to  the organization.  Our first session focuses on the innovation process as a structured strategy  that ensures that the innovation owner/team idealizes an innovation and runs with it until it is  successfully implemented.

The second session focuses on patent development and commercialization for internal or  external deployment.  In our admin area, we built a partnership with the corporate technology

School Age Care: Company General Use

oversight department to further enhance the patent contributions within the corporate patent  development program.  We focus on protecting the corporate’s intellectual property by earning  exclusive rights to inventions as well as by recognizing employees with patents that have been  successfully filed, granted and commercialized.  Our awareness sessions focus on the patent  filing/granting process as well as patentability and commercialization requirements.

Insight

What we have learned as part of these awareness/brainstorming sessions is that employees  often underestimate their potential to think without reservations.  It was analyzed that  employees often set their own barriers when it comes to idea generation.  Their self-confidence  often gets in their way to expand their thinking.  With our steps of innovation process, we are  aiding our employees with a structured strategy that can add potential to their free-thinking  ability and can generate ideas much easier and with a higher self-confidence approach.  Our  awareness program has been in place for 3 months now and we have seen significant  improvement in employee idea submission (25% increase), and patent development (30%  increase).  This will provide us with a strong platform as we will focus next on idea  implementation and commercialization.

Approach

Based on the results so far obtained from these sessions, the operating department innovation  SME team agrees that our plan has made a significant positive impact to our innovation and  patent development programs.  We will continue with our first round of sessions and will think  of ways to improve it for the upcoming calendar year.  In the meantime, we will continue to  work to promote idea implementation and commercialization as we will commit to work with  our sister operating departments in the upcoming months to build the momentum required for  ideas to be successfully implemented and potentially commercialized.

