EPISODE 0A - Bala Balasubraniam of Innovation Minds

BALA: 
Human connection is the heart of innovation. As long as you're able to provide the right tools and create the ambience for the right mindset for the employees, and also create a culture through which they will be able to ask the right questions, get the answers, and also be able to pursue the answers, innovation is going to thrive. But saying it is easy, right? 

Even if you're giving the right tools, the next question will be, are they easily adopting it? Are they able to follow the marching orders of moving the whole company as innovative, and also creative? 

One of the things that we do wrong is we make our employees see innovation as a separate discipline. Asking the employees to carve out time from their busy schedules and focus on innovation as another job. You may be able to get some support from innovation evangelists, "Okay I can do it, I can find time." But across the board,  this was not resonating with any of the cultures that I worked at.

That is where I started thinking with my friends and colleagues, we started coming to the conclusion that, hey, innovation shouldn't be a separate discipline. It should be close to whatever you're doing on a day to day basis. You're working on product development, you're working on project development, you're in HR or finance, you have to do certain things anyway as part of your roadmap. Can we bring in innovation thought and innovation discipline tools and frameworks into what they're already doing, and completely transform the way they are getting results?

That is where you will be able to really win over hearts like, "Oh, that makes sense. You're not asking me to do one more extra thing. Rather, you're helping me to make my job easy, I can be the hero within my campus, because I'm able to apply these kind of innovation tools and thoughts in a much more seamless and non-intrusive way."

How do we bring innovation to the core of whatever you're doing? 

We call this INNOVATION AT THE EDGE.

Every company wants to be the next Apple, the next Tesla, the next Google, right? I would say that each and every one of the institutions and the enterprises, they are sincerely trying. But one thing that's often getting overlooked is that they want to put innovation as a separate silo, rather than looking at the successful companies and trying to learn how they were able to really pioneer innovation. 

The one fact is that they are making innovation as part of everybody's everyday job. So innovation is for everyone, all the time. And I would say that it's for every scenario that they are working on. You're bringing innovation closer to what they are doing already. You have to create the framework or programme of innovation in such a way that you use innovation to bring in engagement rather than trying to engage the employees first, and then as the outcome or goal work towards innovation. 

That is a huge difference: Innovate to engage employees, rather than engaging the employees first, to get to the end goal of being an innovative company. 

When you go to any culture and ask them to be innovative, it's not easy. Unless it's simple, it is fun, it's exciting. So that is where Innovation Minds is really helping to make innovation quickly adaptable, so everybody is going to be raising their hand, "Oh my god, this is so cool, I want to be part of this journey." The more you're pulling them into this kind of collective notion that we are on to something new here, and enabling them, supporting them to be innovators. After that when you throw any challenge at them, they're going to say, "You know what, I'll just take care of it." 

I think INNOVATION AT THE EDGE is working out really well with pretty much all the clients that we have, into such a huge success story.