Collaborate to Innovate

FountainBlue’s July 8 When She Speaks program was on the topic of ‘Collaborate to Innovate’.  It was inspiring and innovating to hear the wisdom and best practices around innovation and collaboration from our esteemed panelists. Below is a compilation of their advice and best practices for collaborative innovation.
Be Purposeful

• Invite creative problem solving and focus on producing functional results which wow customers. 
• Create and grow a culture where your leaders and innovators feel connected and important, designing and delivering solutions which serve others well.
• Have a plan to collaborate and innovate, but also be willing to prove yourself wrong if the input, data and experience reflects that’s the case.
• Proactively invite synergistic opportunities between people, between product lines, between geographies, between groups, etc., 

Bring Out the Best in Others

• Be intentional about how time is used, and respectful of everyone’s stress levels and conflicting needs in this time of great change. 
• Distribute ownership, empower others and invite engagement from a wide range of potential innovators, even if they are not necessarily the key engineering/technical staff.
• Be fully present (rather than multitasking) when interacting with others, so that they feel important, that their words are important, and that the work they do is important.
• Reward and recognize risk-taking and experimentation, making it safe to fail forward.
• Accept that there are many valid ways to collaborate and innovate, and that everyone has a right and responsibility to participate in the process, not just people with the right title/experience/gender/role etc.,

Make the Business Case

• Measure and report on the internal or external value for collaborative innovation projects.
• It’s hard to make a business case to solve tomorrow’s problems, but having open conversations full of healthy dialogue, and leveraging past successes and market data to inform strategies might help you do just that!

Connect Silos 

• Invite opportunities to build bridges between different people, products, locations, etc., which lead to diversity in thought, in perspective, in ideas, in experience, etc.,
• Include non-tech leaders at all levels to contribute to innovation challenges or brainstorming/ problem-solving meetings where appropriate.

Our panelists have challenged us all to think outside the box on how we can all better collaborate to be part of something bigger, for both collaboration and innovation are foundational to changing the world for the better.

Please join me in thanking our hosts at Samsung and our esteemed panelists for FountainBlue’s July 8 When She Speaks program was on the topic of ‘Collaborate to Innovate’:

• Facilitator Linda Holroyd, CEO, FountainBlue
• Panelist Chinmoyee Deshpande, Digital Supply Chain – Transformation Strategy Leader, IBM
• Panelist Sanchita Gupta, Senior Director Human Resources Business Partner, Samsung Research America
• Panelist Kate Mulligan, Communications & Innovation Programs, Strategy & Innovation for the Office of the CTO, Lam Research
• Panelist Stacey Moser, Chief Commercial Officer (CCO), GE Digital Grid Solutions
• with introductory remarks by Roxanne Dos Santos, Director, Workforce Communications and Engagement, Samsung Research America 

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