One of the fun aspects of going to a conference is meeting people. Whether it meeting old friends or new ones, connections provide the leitmotif that accents the event.
This afternoon, I had the pleasure of meeting fellow blogger Jeffery Phillips of Innovate On Purpose. It was great to put a face to the name, and we had a nice discussion about the challenges of bringing the message of sustainable innovation to organizations. Jeffery proved to be a engaging in person as he is articulate in his blog posts.
The chance to hear stories form field experience in the form of practitioner presentations is another reason for going to a conference. This afternoon, I sat in on a very interesting session in the Can Innovation Be Made Predictable track presented by Shane Johnson of Bank of America. The topic was Six Sigma & Innovation. This is a subject that gained some serious attention last year when 3M stubbed its toe in the introduction of Six Sigma.
In this session, Shane talked about BofA’s innovation journey. He described how the organization moved through various stages of innovation maturity—from being strictly focused on uniformity of delivery to investigating innovation methods to exploring how to make innovation a repeatable phenomenon and culminating with cultural transformation for innovation. Becoming an ambidextrous organization, one that can both delivery reliable quality and drive innovation, has delivered measurable value for the company.
Some of the ways in which BofA measures its innovation results include:
- Units of Innovation Output – such as number of ideas generated, WIP, yield, kill rate, and strategic mix (incremental, strategic, breakthrough)
- Time to Market Impact of Innovation – expressed as average project completion time, average time to launch, average aging (Shane did warn that these measures require careful interpretation in that more strategic and breakthrough innovations tend to need more time to mature.)
- Quality
- Outcome Benefits of Innovation – such as % revenue from new products, percent benefits from new products, number of patents
While BofA is still evaluating the specific metric they use for evaluating the impact of innovation, they are right to place an emphasis on this.
Shane finished his presentation with a summary of key dimensions along which BofA has tweaked it Six Sigma method to better foster innovation. All in all it was a very interesting story about one company’s journey in to the innovation wilderness.
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