The Medium is More Than One Message - Innovation as Revenue

In 1964 Marshal McLuhan made famous the term "The medium is the message" when describing the relationship between the medium delivering the message, and the message itself. When discussing innovation and revenue generation, I believe the medium used to encourage innovation within a company ultimately becomes part of the message of encouragement. To extrapolate further the statement "Innovation is revenue generation" would also be true.

When a business focuses almost solely on short term revenue generation (e.g. a lack of clear strategic goals beyond a one to two year horizon) I contend that the long term life span of the organization is placed in jeopardy. Instead business leaders should place an equally strong emphasis (if not leaning more) on building a corporate laboratory environment that encourages long term, disruptive creativity.

For the purpose of definiton innovation can take the form of new ideas for products or services, including revenue diversification based on new economic partnerships and acquisitions. On a more subtle level innovation may also include progressive business process and workflow reengineering that produces new revenue by reenergizing old renevue generators.

As described in the former, innovation is macro in scope including large scale changes in an organization's philosophies and/or overall strategy. In its latter representation, innovation creates a more effective, focused organization. This secondary form can also create an environment more conducive to encouraging innovations born from internal players, as more efficient processes can uncover previously misused bandwidth.

This marriage of efficiency and creativity can flourish when an organization createhealthy environment that welcomes, documents, reviews and adopts ideas created from within. When business leaders show a genuine interest and belief that the best ideas are waiting to be discovered by their charges, management and employees will respond in kind with genuine interest in finding, if you will, a better mousetrap.  Thus an organization must be prepared to follow a road map that includes a robust internal process for inviting and evaluating ideas and suggestions from officers, employees and even outside sources.

The genesis of this path begins with open communication. Every level of a hierarchy must understand the importance of sharing information across all corporate levels and borders. When every player understands the short and long term rules of engagement, creative thought can become more focused in its energies. An employee who has been given a clear understanding of their employer's goals will be the best filter of their own ideas, and whether they merit submission.

With submissions it is key for an organization to not place an over reliance on standard forms of business communication, such as email - nor something as dated as a physical submission box. Emails are too easily lost in the shuffle of daily office routines, while the submission box is too public, discounting the power of embarrassment for employees as well as the ease in which pieces of paper can become just as lost as an email - and just as quickly.

Instead the submission process should reside within its own enterprise level application. This application should employ a set of categories to assist employees in targeting the right audience (that will coincidentally also provide an audit trail of review and approvals).  The application will also allow all submissions to be held in a central proprietary database - a key advantage when considering the ROI on creating such an application.

Overseeing this application will be a group of Subject Matter Experts that must include individuals from both management and general employee levels as a matter of ensuring a full spectrum of skills and knowledge. The group will then review submissions in the database, and the application will provide the committee the ability to provide direct feedback while also allowing approval and escalation of those submissions deemed worthy of further review.

An additional function of this application will involve providing the ability for the SME committee to defer review of submissions until a later date. This may take place for submissions that upon a cursory review do not align with current market conditions or business timelines (e.g. A harried fourth quarter) but do merit another opportunity to appear before the committee. These deferred items could then have flags set at the database level that would automatically reintroduce the submission and a pre-determined interval. An additional benefit to the organization is that all submissions will be recorded as company property in a formal structure that can be drawn upon even decades later. 

McLuhan's term regarding the power of medium maintains a lasting legacy that will continue to expand in scope as technology engrains itself deeper into the woodwork of our daily lives. For business leaders, to follow this evolution by creating a medium for innovation drives the message to employees that innovation is indeed revenue generation. This approach will serve notice to the market and competitors that your organization is working in earnest towards guaranteeing its long term health and value as a player, and as an investment opportunity.