Five ways to create a thriving innovation ecosystem within your organisation

Innovation isn鈥檛 the role of a team or a function. It鈥檚 the way an organisation operates, the way its people think and how they go about their day-to-day. But how does a business create a culture in which its people challenge the status quo, actively pose new ideas and work together to be part of the solutions? How does it reach across the entire organisation and not just small, ambitious pockets?

Emma Jackson, client innovation manager at Mills & Reeve, explores some of the ways organisations can achieve an innovation ecosystem:

Use champions to share the knowledge with your community

Gathering together a group of champions across a variety of roles, levels and teams will help foster wide-scale engagement. Using this approach will encourage a culture shift from 鈥渨hy should I care?鈥� towards a positive understanding of what innovative thinking can do for teams and clients. Empowering those champions to gather innovative ideas from all levels of the business means that everyone plays their part in building an innovative culture.

Champions will also play a key role in sharing the knowledge! Divulging know-how and good news stories to your organisation鈥檚 wider community (both internal and external) will only serve to encourage them to build on what鈥檚 gone before and support a new generation of innovative workers.

Key is a clear direction from the business that innovative activities are just as valuable as the business as usual. Mills & Reeve has a group of innovation champions that are allocated a quota of valuable hours to spend on initiatives, demonstrating to all involved the commitment and importance of the work.

Utilise user-led solutions

Stories sell! Bringing people along for the journey is critical to engender a culture where innovation forms part of the day job. A way of doing this is embedding enthusiasts across the business, but importantly allowing teams to decide what鈥檚 important for them and take ownership of it with support on the technical side of it from specialists. For Mills & Reeve, those specialists are housed in the innovation and legal technology team.

A misconception about legal technology is that it is the 鈥減roblem solver鈥� when actually it鈥檚 one of many tools to utilise when creating a solution or solving a problem. There is no point adding technology to an inefficient process. Nirvana is the optimum of people, process and technology鈥nd appreciating that sometimes you don鈥檛 actually need all three for a solution! A better approach is to start with where you want to get to and reverse engineer the process to find the most effective and efficient way to the solution.

A critical part of success is appreciating that anything that has a positive measurable impact is innovation. It doesn鈥檛 need to be light bulb moments that completely change your operating model, it can be small and focused.

Jayne Hussey, head of Mills & Reeve鈥檚 Birmingham office works with in-house legal teams to support them with their commercial challenges. She has seen first-hand the benefits of designing solutions bespoke to each client team through our award-winning collaboration platform, Volume Control. She said: 鈥淰olume Control has changed the game in terms of the way we collaborate with clients.

鈥淯sing our intuitive, easy-to-use platform, our in-house clients can see a holistic view of their workload, detailed status updates and who is responsible 鈥� be that their in-house team or any one of their expert advisers. The easily accessible data allows clients to make informed decisions in a way they have never before been able to do, and in turn, allows us to support them in implementing changes."

Head of Mills & Reeve鈥檚 Birmingham, Jayne Hussey

Tap into people鈥檚 realities

It can be all too easy to assume that everyone is as enthusiastic about the new piece of technology/process/client solution as you! The reality can be somewhat different, particularly when factoring in intense workloads, sales targets and administrative pressures making the idea of learning a new way of doing things totally overwhelming. Take a moment to step into your users鈥� shoes and find ways to show what鈥檚 in it for them and adjust your approach to working with them. Sometimes the carrot works better than the stick.

At Mills & Reeve we acknowledge the fact that our lawyers have trained to deliver outstanding legal advice and not play with technology. Our innovation team is made up of technology and process experts, as well as an active engagement team, which means that most of the time the lawyers can deliver law and the team can support on the innovation and technology side of the client鈥檚 requirements. Saying that, it鈥檚 useful for people across the business to have a healthy appreciation of what the technology can do, without being able to 鈥減ress the buttons鈥�.

Build a team of enthusiastic enablers

Every organisation will have talented people ready to lead innovation initiatives and embed themselves into the business鈥� innovative activities. Think about this before rushing to recruit innovation 鈥渆xperts鈥� as you may already have amazing talent on your doorstep. At Mills & Reeve every member of our client innovation team started in a role elsewhere in the business!

Keep it fun

Innovation at its core is about doing things differently to increase efficiencies. There鈥檚 no reason why that can鈥檛 be fun! In order to have a successful eco-system everyone in the business needs to be aware of innovation and be talking about it. Mills & Reeve ran a successful three-year campaign of innovation weeks which included lots of fun activities and challenges splitting the business into two teams and adding a competition element. At the end of that campaign there was a national internal awards day where presentations were made to award teams and individuals for their innovative activities. This received great internal feedback for how enjoyable it was and brought the subject of innovation to the front of people鈥檚 minds. Think about ways you could implement this in your organisation!