Strategy-Aligned Innovation: Keys to Strategy Execution

Jennifer Rosenzweig
Carlson Marketing Worldwide

Bill Barberg
President
Insightformation, Inc.

Innovation can come from many sources, but one of the most powerful and poorly-leveraged sources is ideas from employees. Many organizations have old-fashioned "suggestion boxes" or informal programs that do little to inspire employees to submit ideas. And when ideas are submitted, they're usually not systematically followed up on. In contrast to this typical low-impact approach, an employee innovation program that is properly inspired, focused and managed can turbo-charge your ability to execute strategy and improve results.

Strategy-Aligned Innovation (SAI) combines powerful proven principles with enabling technologies to support improved alignment, innovation and strategy execution. Innovation programs have been shown to increase the number of employee suggestions, but if suggestions are not focused on executing the organization's strategy, the leaders may face a no-win dilemma of either implementing the suggestions (applying resources in sub-optimal ways and diluting focus) or rejecting the suggestions (undermining employee moral and support for the program).

Strategy-Aligned Innovation extends the powerful concepts of Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard methodology, such as the use of cascading strategy maps to translate high-level strategic themes into the critical supporting objectives, so employees have a dramatically improved line-of-sight between their work and the high-level strategies of the organization. Through the use of cross-functional theme teams, consensus-building techniques, and powerful communication tools, SAI helps clarify the choices, causal drivers and obstacles where innovations can have the greatest impact on supporting strategy execution. This provides a focus that serves as a catalyst to inspire employee suggestions. SAI then leverages a systematic process for generating ideas and proprietary technology and methodology to evaluate, select, reward and communicate ideas. The technology-enabled combination of a state-of-the-art approach to improving ORGANIZATIONAL ALIGNMENT and a research-based systematic approach to generate and implement EMPLOYEE-DRIVEN INNOVATION can accelerate strategy execution and performance improvements.

Key Topics:

• This presentation builds the business case for integrating alignment and innovation to achieve superior results. You'll learn how some companies have gained a competitive advantage by implementing processes to engage employees and leverage their ideas. You'll also learn how the Balanced Scorecard methodology has evolved from focusing on balanced measurement to become a rich set of principles, tools and techniques for enhancing alignment and strategy execution.
• We'll explore the growing interplay between innovation and strategy, and how the Balanced Scorecard methodology is evolving as a framework to align and optimize both. Macro-level innovations may require organizational transformation and alignment to support the innovation. In turn, micro-level innovation should be aligned so that a multitude of refinements collectively serve to make the macro-level innovation successful.
• Learn how blending assessment, program design, branding, creative development, rewards, training and measurement can create a state-of-the-art innovation program.
• You'll see how innovative technologies bring the theories to life and weave strategy, alignment and innovation into the fabric of your organization.
• Learn from real-world examples where these tools and techniques have proven themselves and explore how their integration is breaking new ground in two of today's hottest business topics-strategy execution and innovation.

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