Innovation Consulting
“We must achieve greater impact in science, engineering and innovation by encouraging employees to develop and deploy breakthrough, disruptive innovations...”
Dr. Mark Peters, Laboratory Director
At the Idaho National Labortory (INL) we applied our Fast, Wide, and Deep methodology in response to Dr. Mark Peters’ call to action. In the FAST phase, we quickly aligned leaders around our value-driven approach to innovation and built key stakeholder support and capability (Technology Deployment, HR, the LDRD program, etc.). Establishing the right coalition of sponsors, ambassadors, and facilitators is critical to ensuring a successful launch. In the WIDE phase, we concentrated on enrolling and empowering employees. We spread the word, conducted CO-STAR trainings with all the early adopters, initiated the annual innovation week, ran numerous Rapid Idea Improvement Sessions for researchers with high potential ideas, and helped streamline the commercialization process. We worked to establish a critical mass of contributors who embraced a value creation mindset and who were comfortable using the new practices to elevate the innovation potential of their science and engineering.
Phase 3 (DEEP) involved partnering with InnovationOne to take an empirical look at the factors that successfully create and nurture a culture of innovation at the Lab as well as those that stifle it. DOE’s Office of Technology Transfer funded our research project (ETHOS) which grew to include 6 labs with over 2000 respondents. The findings were enlightening and offer great promise for performance improvement (see video). We discovered (1) the innovation cultures in the labs differ greatly and, on a whole, innovation cultures within the labs score lower than industry benchmarks, (2) lab performance, in nearly all areas measured, correlates strongly with the health of a lab’s innovation culture. Analysis of the second finding revealed that improving innovation culture scores, especially with respect to technology transfer, can increase inventions, commercial outcomes, partnerships, and publications by 70%. This remarkable discovery shows how the DOE, INL, and the public can gain a significantly greater return on their innovation investment.
Highlights:
Aligned leadership around strategy and priorities
Established capable innovation ecosystem
Designed and delivered innovation training
Researched innovation drivers and impact