Accelerating Innovation Mission and Purpose
Accelerating Innovation is a concept across all of OIT that encourages and incentivizes experimentation with new ideas and technologies. Staff are encouraged to develop proofs of concept that can be evaluated for broader implementation. The goal is to continue expanding OIT’s core strengths with innovation, creativity and continual improvement.
Accelerating Innovation encourages all OIT staff to expand innovative thinking in their daily work and projects by supporting experimentation with new ideas, capturing lessons learned from low-risk failures, and elevating OIT to more nimbly respond to evolving customer needs and technology changes.
Like many other initiatives in OIT, Accelerating Innovation is a self-initiated concept. OIT staff can use information on this website to access key resources and processes, and to start learning broader concepts around innovation.
History and Now
Accelerating Innovation in OIT started years ago as a pilot activity and then a broader-scale initiative. It was a more structured, intentional process with a coordination team that facilitated people sharing ideas in a crowd-sourcing platform, provided coaching to strengthen ideas and facilitate progress, reviewed work as it progressed, and awarded cash incentives. Along the way, the coordination team developed and coordinated new organization wide concepts like OIT Innovation Time and the monthly Zooming In On Innovation webinars where OIT staff demonstrated and discussed new and innovative concepts. Zooming In On Innovation notes/recordings may now be found on the OIT Accelerating Innovation MS Teams channel. The crowd-sourcing platform previously used to propose and share ideas is no longer required. Anyone can now leverage the information on these pages to pursue innovative advancements in their own unique and creative ways.
As OIT has continued to mature as an organization, so has the model for Accelerating Innovation. The concept expanded from encouraging individual innovators to focusing on team-level practices that promote creativity, innovation and continual improvement. These have been represented and promoted within OIT’s annual Cascading Goals and other activities.
Now Accelerating Innovation is being recognized as a core competency across OIT and the prior activities have been transformed into self-initiated services that anyone can engage with as they see benefit to advancing their innovative ideas.
What’s OIT seeking to achieve?
- Grow OIT’s culture of enabling and fostering innovation
- Educate people about the Innovation Framework
- Communicate our values of innovation, creativity, experimentation, risk taking, and learning from failure
- Increase activity and awareness around innovative ideas and outcomes
- Individual or team level – Ideas that don’t need any resources
- Cross-team or departmental level – Ideas that may need resources
- Influence and guide experimentation – promote continual improvement
- Encourage greater experimentation to engage people and increase experience that could be tapped later
- Define and refine needs/ideas first, then conceptualize a solution
- Experiment and build proofs of concept for “strong” ideas
- Keep it simple
- No top-down complexity, be flexible/adaptable to feedback, use available tools, help staff self-initiate their involvement when and how they want
What types of priorities and ideas is OIT encouraging to address? (what’s “in” and what’s “out”)
- Anything’s possible. Here are some thoughts:
- It’s about experimentation, creativity, innovation and continual improvement – it’s not about telling someone else how they can do their job or do their job better
- Some ideas may be radical and totally new – other great ideas may be replicating and improving something that’s being done successfully elsewhere
- It’s not only about developing or implementing products or technologies – it may be about doing things in a new way or flipping a traditional business model
- It’s about OIT staying current as technologies continue to evolve in radical and unpredictable ways
What values are we promoting?
We’ll always maintain our excellent service levels and keep our broad portfolios of systems and services healthy. We can attain all this in new and useful ways with increased:
- Experimentation
- Work with it to really understand it
- More experience/experimentation enables us all to respond faster and more effectively with new challenges and evolving technologies
- Some experiments may not pay off immediately – but they may set the stage for the future
- Creativity
- There’s rarely one right answer or approach
- Many of our traditions are tried and true; and we need to rigorously maintain our professional responsibilities – we could also be open to building on our past experience in new and different ways
- Innovation
- Reframe problems into opportunities
- Identify and leverage strategic value
- Innovation = New AND Useful
- Take Risks
- Take “measured” risks and expect to learn from failures – document and share both failures and successes – review past failures to see what might inspire a different approach
- Others? Let us know what else you value by commenting on this page