For decades we have heard business consultants tell us that people are the most valuable resource in the company. Well, I would like to challenge that statement seen from an innovation perspective. Don’t get me wrong – I do recognize the importance of creative, hardworking people. But can a company be too dependent on the employees?

In many smaller companies a very few employees drive the innovation. This makes the innovation process vulnerable because what will happen if one or more of these employees stops working for the company? Will innovation be slown down or put on hold? Or will the company manage to continue innovating? In many cases changes in staff can have severe impact on processes like innovation.

I see innovation as an ongoing process and not as project with a start and stop date. It’s important for the process to have several employees involved. The more employees who feels ownership of the process the stronger the process becomes and the more likely to succeed it will become.

When innovation is considered as a process with several employees involved, the process becomes less people-dependent. If one or more of the employees stop working for the company, the process will in most cases survive.

The innovation process can in many ways be compared to the company’s product roadmap. The company’s product roadmap is typically not people-dependent – so why should the innovation process be it? Where the product roadmap typically is very detailed, the innovation process can be more diffuse. It is possible though to have some degree of structure in the innovation process.

Form an innovation committee
Some years ago I worked for a Danish company which had a product committee. The Product committee was a group of employees from different departments of the company. R&D, Sales, Marketing, Production etc. had one representative from the department. The committee’s job was to present new product concepts to the company directors. By involving employees from different departments the committee could enlighten all kind of aspects of the concept before recommending it to the directors. And the directors got a far better decision basis than if only the R&D department had described the concept.

Unfortunately the company didn’t work with innovation the same way. One person was driving the innovation, and he had a lot of other things to do, so the innovation process was never really in focus. If the company had established an innovation committee like their product committee I’m sure the company could had been one of the most innovative companies in their market segment.

So, how do you establish an innovation committee? I would recommend having one member from each department in the committee so as many aspects of the process from idea to product can be covered. The committee will have two primary tasks:

• Creating and maintaining innovation roadmaps
• Contributing with new ideas and technologies to the organization

The committee should have a coordinator responsible for the overall control of the process. This person takes initiative to arrange meetings. Tasks like taking minutes, structuring thoughts, ideas etc. can be delegated to other members of the committee.

The Gatekeeper role
The employees in the innovation committee should be assigned gatekeeper roles. The gatekeeper has to observe developments and research within a specific field (typically the field they normally work with) – and get hands-on experience if possible. This way the committee keeps updated within fields relevant to the company. Gatekeepers can bring new knowledge to the committee meetings and share their experiences. The committee should have an intranet site where this knowledge can be shared electronically (preferable in a searchable database). This will ensure knowledge to stay in the committee/company in case an employee leaves the committee or company.

Innovation Roadmap
It’s difficult to give any direct tips on how the innovation roadmap should be formed and what it should contain. But in my opinion the roadmap should contain at least these four subjects:

• Opportunities
• “Need to do” actions
• Product convergence
• Competitor initiatives

Summary
To sum it up, I believe innovation should be considered a process with involvement of several people from a great part of the organization. I also believe that it’s risky to depend too much a few key employees. They might not stay with the company forever. The process can be controlled and handled by a special committee and knowledge can this way be shared in a structured way.