How to setup an innovation program

ConTech Best Practices: Organizational Design, Solutions Process

Aug 08, 2024

This is the third post in our ConTech Best Practices series where we seek to provide evergreen educational content to serve as the foundation for the emerging role of a 'Construction Technologist’. This series aims to codify best practices for construction professionals who are employing technology solutions and delivering change programs.

All the articles in the series can be found here.

This article is written by Prakash Senghani who is the Co-Founder and CEO of Navatech Group whose mission is to digitize high-risk industries like construction and the Co-Founder of Saifety.ai, an AI enabled chatbot for the construction industry.

Prior to this he was the Director of Innovation and Digital Construction at AECOM for the Middle East.

This article serves as a roadmap for organizations who are seeking to build new innovation programs. It explains the steps to undertake to understand where the organization is, where the organization seeks to go and to identify, develop and support the achievement of this future state.

What does a successful innovation program look like?

Innovation is a buzzword, constantly focused on and discussed by leaders and professionals in the construction sector. It’s integral to improving the way we build and increasing productivity.

Despite this interest, successful innovation programs are few and far between and they receive less funding and investment than they deserve.

There's a variety of reasons for this but one seems key. In a fast paced, low margin and high volume construction industry, businesses are focused on risk mitigation and program conformance. Innovation is seen as a ‘nice to have’ rather than a must.

The return on investment of these programs may not be clear and it can be viewed as a spurious addition to the bottom line.

One way to overcome this is by sharing best practice on how to set up and maximize the success of your program to ensure clear ROI.

Here’s what I’ve learned.

Why are innovation programs important?
Defining the vision of your innovation program
How do we start an innovation program?
1. Discovery
2. Formal vision setting program (design thinking workshops)
3. Gap Analysis
4. Implementation plan
Takeaways for startups

Reading Time: 9 min

Why are innovation programs important?

Whether your organization has an innovation program or not, most companies will have pockets of internal innovation. The reason is that there are always people who identify better or streamlined methods of working and delivery.

By providing a formal innovation program, the organization is able to tap into the latent innovative potential of the organization and orient this towards strategic business goals. It provides a framework to coalesce the ‘innovation pockets’ with consistency and oversight to ensure efforts are not duplicated and innovations spurred are beneficial departmentally, regionally or organizationally.

In addition to this there are 3 key reasons why innovation programs are now necessary:

Structured Innovation
As discussed, innovation programs provide structure, a vehicle to drive the organization forward and a way to broadcast successfully implemented ideas.
Market Perception
Clients and customers want to work with organizations which are viewed as innovative and market leading. Having an innovation program is important for company branding.
Employee Engagement
Employees and the younger generation are looking for more than just salaries. They want to work for companies which have a purpose and innovation and improving the way we work plays an important role.

Defining the vision of your innovation program

The vision of an innovation program should be based on achieving the organization's strategic priorities. These strategic priorities should be developed each year by the c-suite using a goal setting process. Examples of their priorities might include setting up a new business unit, diversifying the way we work or improving safety on site.

Once this is defined we can create a vision for our innovation program which aligns with the company's strategic priorities. From this vision we establish ‘innovation criteria’ which we use to evaluate and assess new initiatives and determine which the innovation program will support.

The innovation criteria is the framework we use to examine and prioritize all the innovation program initiatives which will be undertaken for that year. It allows us to rank the impact and alignment of an initiative with the company's strategic priorities. We use it to triage, assess and prioritize all new and existing innovations within the organization which helps the team understand where to direct limited resources.

An example (generic) innovation criteria could be ‘How many people will this initiative affect?’. It is better to support an initiative which saves 15 minutes for 100 people than 10 hours for 1 person.

As an organization, we want to use innovation as a lever to accelerate progress to our strategic priorities

How do we start an innovation program?

Below are the four steps we undertake to build an innovation program.

In the following sections, discovery, vision setting, gap analysis and implementation plan we define how a company forms the program.

Step 1: Discovery

The first step is discovery. This involves understanding what innovation is already occurring in your organization and who is involved in the process. We want to find all the existing initiatives and programs and catalog them. In this step we want to learn about our organization.

Discovery helps managers to understand what they are great at and where they need to improve

To discover what is occurring in the organization, the team can undertake:

Desktop Research
This will be utilized to find existing programs and projects in the organization.
Need Finding interviews
This involves interviewing stakeholders at all levels of the business (C-suite, middle management, supervisors & engineers) to understand needs and pain points while identifying opportunities for improvement.
Business line / Department embeds
This involves spending time within a department to understand how they operate and what initiatives and work they are undertaking.
Client interviews
This involves interviews with clients to understand digital requirements / needs and perception on the company’s digital offering.
Blanket Surveys
This involves sending surveys to the organization to understand initiatives being undertaken.

From this discovery process you will be able to create a list of initiatives and understand what is occurring within the organization.

Step 2: Formal vision setting program (design thinking workshops)

Once the discovery process is complete the next step is to undertake design thinking workshops. These workshops are to have participants from a cross section of people from the business (c-suite, senior leaders, middle management, supervisors and engineers).

The first step in the workshop is to understand the current capabilities of the organization. To do this each participant completes a canvassing exercise. Two example exercises are:

Rose and Thorn exercise
In this exercise participants list the organizations:
- Roses
  Positive aspects, strengths or successful elements of the organization.
- Thorns
  Negative aspects, weaknesses or areas for improvement of the organization.
Sailboat Exercise
In this exercise participants imagine they are on a sailboat journeying towards an island. They need to consider the following elements which may impact their journey including (the sailboat is a metaphor for the organization):
- Wind
  Factors which will propel the sailboat forward such as strengths, opportunities or successful elements.
- Anchor
  Factors which are holding the organization back such as weaknesses or areas for improvement.
- Under the water
  Threats, risks or challenges which are unexpected and could threaten the organization's progress or change its direction.

From these exercises we are able to gain an understanding of:

What is working (and not) within the organization.
What areas the organization is good (and bad) at.

Our next step is to share the results of the discovery process with the participants. This includes the corporate vision, the business model, organizational structure and strategic priorities.

Armed with this information, we ask participants to complete an exercise to help us understand what success looks like for the organization.

They complete a future envisioning exercise using the prompt ‘what will the press say about our company in 5 years if the innovation program is successful?’

Each participant is required to write a twitter / linkedin / blog post of an example press article. This provides insights in terms of:

Where is the company today
Where is the company going
What areas must be improved to meet this future state
Which teams and departments will be impacted by this change
What the success metrics we need to use

The exercise is valuable because the workshop participants represent a cross-section of the business and collated, they know what is achievable and possible. It provides a realistic future state the business could achieve.

In summary this workshop has helped us to develop a deeper understanding of:

What the current state of the business is
What an achievable future state of the business is.

Armed with this information we are now able to complete a gap analysis.

Step 3: Gap Analysis

The discovery process helped us to understand the current state of innovation within the organization and opportunities for improvement. The workshop process has helped us to understand what the future could look like and provide a clearer picture on the current capability of the organization.

We now complete a gap analysis to identify gaps or shortcomings which the organization has to address to achieve the future state.

Gap analysis helps us to identify priorities in your innovation program

The way we identify these gaps is through a digital maturity assessment. This is an evaluative process to measure an organization's level of digital readiness, capability and effectiveness. It assists with understanding the baseline, areas for improvement or investment and priorities to guide our innovation journey.

There are different options for the assessment:

Future state Gap Analysis
This involves identifying the gap between your current state and future state.
Competitive Gap Analysis
This involves doing an analysis against peers, understanding where they are, where you are including areas for improvement and market leadership.

Upon completion of the gap analysis we are able to understand what is working and the areas for improvement within this business.

We then use the information that we have gathered from the previous steps to fully develop employee personas - groups of employees with similar traits and characteristics in the organization. The identified gaps (areas for improvement) are mapped to employee personas. This helps us to understand which employees will be affected by the focus areas we have now identified.

Example employee personas within an organization

This is useful as we are able to understand the key internal stakeholders who will be affected by the innovation program and whom we need to actively engage with. This information guides new initiatives and defines the support employees need to help the innovation program meet its goals (e.g training and upskilling, new role opportunities).

Step 4: Implementation plan

After completing the gap analysis we are clear on what is working, the areas for improvement and which employee personas will be affected. This allows us to create ‘themes’ or ‘focus areas’ for the innovation program and formalize the innovation criteria to evaluate initiatives by applying a heavier weighting to the focus areas.

The first step of the new innovation program is to create initiatives to spur innovation in line with the identified themes for the organization. These initiatives can include:

Creating a time bound innovation program / competition
- The innovation team can create problem statements for each business line based on the identified themes (focus areas).
- Employees can put forward proposals and solutions which will be reviewed using the innovation criteria.
Create a portal for registering ideas and receiving support
- This portal will allow employees to register their proposals and initiatives on an ongoing basis.
- An evaluation committee will periodically review these using the criteria and select which to allocate resources towards.
Review existing innovation and successful ideas cataloged in Step 1
- Using the criteria and identified gaps / themes, the team can rationalize and prioritize the existing list of initiatives to be supported and scaled in the business.

Funnel implementation approach: New proposals are reviewed against innovation criteria, shortlisted for problem discovery then piloting

As a first step, this process helps to kickstart the innovation program by identifying ‘top of funnel’ opportunities and increasing the number and awareness of innovation initiatives. Once these innovations are collected the next steps include:

Reviewing initiatives with the innovation committee using the innovation criteria.
Piloting and testing the most promising new ideas.
Scaling successful pilot projects throughout the organization.

But how do we develop proposals and create project plans for shortlisted initiatives? And how do we run successful pilots for new ideas or technology solutions? These will be answered in other articles in the series.

Takeaways for startups

These takeaways are focused on startups selling to corporates.

Identify the innovation criteria of the organization you are selling to
These are used to rank the impact and alignment of any new initiative - it’s the goal posts which you will be measured against. Determining this is valuable for your sales cycle as you can tailor your pitch to the company by highlighting alignment to their needs.
Identify focus areas
Gap analysis involves the identification of focus (priority) areas the innovation team will be actively investing resources and money into. This will change from company to company and could include themes and areas such as ‘safety’ or ‘reality capture.’ Identify the focus area for the company and determine / show how your solution aligns with their strategic goal.
Understand customer personas
If an innovation program has internal customer personas, understanding this can be valuable in recognizing who will be impacted by your solutions. With this information you can identify key personas and tailor training / support programs.

Prakash Senghani is the Co-Founder and CEO of Navatech Group whose mission is to digitize high-risk industries like construction and the Co-Founder of Saifety.ai, an AI enabled chatbot for the construction industry.