Keep Your Innovation Team Off the Stage

If your idea challenges draw the same few people every year, look at who stands in front of the CEO.

The CEO stopped at Maimon’s stand and asked about his project. Maimon, a 66-year-old technician, froze. It was HP Indigo’s annual demo day, and HP’s leadership was touring the stands to hear from the employees behind that year’s projects.

Avi Zoaretz, then HP Indigo’s innovation leader, was walking next to the CEO. When the tour ended, he went back to Maimon’s stand to find out what had happened. “In 30 years, this is the first time I’ve ever spoken to the CEO,” Maimon told him.

Avi is now Director of Global Open Innovation and Intrapreneurship at Orbia, a company of more than 22,000 employees in about 56 countries, and he still tells Maimon’s story, because that moment captures a problem he has met year after year. In more than 12 years of running internal innovation programs, he has built stage gates, steering committees, demo days and strong campaign materials, and still found it hard every year to get employees to take part.

Process tells employees how to innovate. In Avi’s experience, whether they actually do depends on what they feel will happen to their ideas. Many fear the innovation team will take the credit, or take the idea itself.

So Avi made a rule: the innovation team stays off the stage. The employees behind the ideas present to the CEO, keep the credit and lead every new campaign. Avi credits that rule with Orbia’s engagement numbers: 75% of employees now engage with the innovation program, against a benchmark of about 30%.

Management gave Avi’s team a mandate to bring innovation into the company. In Avi’s reading, that mandate is to bring innovation in, not to be its face. So one of his first decisions as an innovation manager was to take his own team off the stage, himself included.

He told them he never wanted to see them at the front. They would stay out of the presentations, so that in any meeting with the CEO, the employee who came up with an idea would do the talking.

He has implemented this rule at Orbia, where his innovation team of about 10 people around the world works with more than 200 innovation champions across 56 countries. At Orbia, the program’s screens and PR feature only the employees who submitted ideas, because Avi has asked his team to keep their own faces out of both.

When Avi explains why he believes in this, he remembers two employees he worked with at HP Indigo, years before Orbia: Maimon, the technician who froze in front of the CEO, and Moshe, a manufacturing employee with an idea about shoeboxes.

A demo day, the day where Maimon froze, was HP Indigo’s yearly showcase of its top ideas. Employees from across the company came to see their colleagues’ projects, and at the end of the day the CEO and managers toured the stands. For Maimon, that tour was his first conversation with a CEO in three decades.

A year later, at his retirement party, Maimon called the demo day the best day of his career, and said he would remember it for the rest of his life.

Avi tells the story because the gap between senior managers and the rest of the company is easy to miss from the top. For senior managers, a conversation with the CEO is routine. For many employees, a single conversation like Maimon’s can stay with them for a whole career. That is why Avi believes that giving employees a platform to be seen is an integral part of innovation culture, alongside ROI.

A second story from HP shows what the same rule produced when an employee’s idea also had commercial value.

Avi’s first innovation challenge at HP Indigo asked employees for the next generation of shoeboxes, a natural fit for a company whose digital presses print packaging. Moshe Shitrit worked in the manufacturing department and loved sneakers, so he looked to Nike ID, the service that lets customers design their own shoes. A customer could spend hundreds of dollars on a one-of-a-kind pair and still receive it in a standard black or orange box - so Moshe proposed using HP’s printing technology to make a box that matched each customer’s design.

Moshe’s idea found its first outside fan by chance: at a conference, Avi met someone from Nike and showed him Moshe’s concept. The Nike contact was so excited, that the project got moving.

Back inside HP, the reception was not as enthusiastic. Marketing told Avi that HP lacked both the technology and a relationship with Nike, and called it a “crazy” project. Other colleagues wondered whether a shoebox counted as innovation at all. Despite this, the project went ahead with large success.

As the project grew, it pulled Moshe into complex travel and strategy work that was new to him. So Avi found him a different place, at the front of the PR, where he received the most recognition and respect from the teams and from management. Other managers saw more in him than his manufacturing role suggested, and they started proposing new roles to him, one after another. Today he is a manager, and that “happened only because of this innovation program,” Avi says.

The shoebox work grew into one of HP’s most strategic projects. In Avi’s view, Moshe’s idea is the reason HP and Nike started working together.

Today, Avi puts employees like Moshe at the center of every launch. Each time a new challenge opens, he asks his managers and leaders to build the campaign around the employees who succeeded the year before, showing their projects and their faces. In his view, those employees are all the PR a challenge needs: colleagues see people like themselves who kept their credit. The program’s participation numbers show where that leaves it against the benchmark.

Benchmarks from idea-management platforms, based on large companies, show how steeply participation drops between an employee’s first visit to the innovation program and submitting an idea:

Avi says the program’s own numbers surprised even him:

Employees have submitted more than 3,000 ideas, which Avi told Inc have delivered $10 million in EBITDA impact. Brightidea, which runs the platform, compared the program with its other customers and found its results more than double those of similarly sized companies.

Orbia runs the same process as other large companies: stage gates, steering committees, demo days. Avi believes it is this rule that puts its participation numbers above the benchmark. Employees know it exists, so they know they will get the stage and the credit.

In 12 years of running innovation programs, Avi has met the same fear again and again: employees worry that the innovation team will take the credit for their ideas, or take the ideas themselves. As long as that fear stays, even a well-run process struggles to bring employees in.

The next challenge launch gives innovation leaders a chance to remove that fear. The stage gates, demo days and campaign plans can stay as they are. The difference is in who is at the forefront: the employees with the ideas, in front of the CEO, in the PR and in the campaign.

Each year, the effect builds. Employees like Maimon and Moshe keep their credit, their faces lead the next campaign, and their colleagues see the credit stay with the person who had the idea. Over time, that cycle builds what Avi calls “absolute trust” between employees and the innovation program, and at Orbia, it has lifted engagement to 75%.

Avi’s advice for getting there is clear: “Give them the stage, protect their credit.”