Inclusion Accelerates Innovation: Get Business Results

Editor's Notes

1. Inherent diversity involves traits you are born with, such as gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Acquired diversity involves traits you gain from experience: Working in another country can help you appreciate cultural differences, for example, while selling to female consumers can give you gender smarts. We refer to companies whose leaders exhibit at least three inherent and three acquired diversity traits as having two-dimensional diversity. https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-diversity-can-drive-innovation
2. http://fortune.com/2017/01/17/best-tech-workplaces-innovation-diversity/
3. Dedicated Innovation Team Innovation Center of Excellence Intrapreneur Program Open Innovation: Corporate Accelerator or Incubator Innovation Tours Innovation Outpost External Accelerator Technology Education/University Partnership Startup Investment Startup Acquisition
4. https://newsroom.cisco.com/documents/10157/14740/790057-WhitePaper-060816-FINAL.pdf From interview: Intrapreneur program - Innovation Everywhere Challenge. We ask them to give us their ideas (not what they're working on today); get together with other people from other functions. They form teams, submit ideas, and we gamify by asking employees to vote on ideas (same process as external). Give them an adventure kit, 1-2K to spend on ideas for finalists. Work with them 1:1, coaches and mentors in their field. Then we have 6 finalists - give them internal and external members, additional cash, ask them to build a minimum viable product. They pitch to an audience of senior execs and external judges (senior venture execs). Give them bonus and also practical money to move ideas forward. Assign executive sponsor and then they have opportunity to go into innovation rotate where core job is protected but able to focus on project. That's where we bring them into innovation center to actually work with customers.
5. https://newsroom.cisco.com/documents/10157/14740/790057-WhitePaper-060816-FINAL.pdf From interview: Intrapreneur program - Innovation Everywhere Challenge. We ask them to give us their ideas (not what they're working on today); get together with other people from other functions. They form teams, submit ideas, and we gamify by asking employees to vote on ideas (same process as external). Give them an adventure kit, 1-2K to spend on ideas for finalists. Work with them 1:1, coaches and mentors in their field. Then we have 6 finalists - give them internal and external members, additional cash, ask them to build a minimum viable product. They pitch to an audience of senior execs and external judges (senior venture execs). Give them bonus and also practical money to move ideas forward. Assign executive sponsor and then they have opportunity to go into innovation rotate where core job is protected but able to focus on project. That's where we bring them into innovation center to actually work with customers.
6. Kickbox is Adobe’s homegrown grassroots innovation program. Adobe has open-sourced Kickbox and thousands of companies have downloaded it from http://kickbox.adobe.com. The diversity problem in innovation: Often only engineering, development and product management roles have permission to innovate. Kickbox provides a six step process and $1,000 of funding to any employee from any job role to pursue their ideas. Innovators are empowered to validate any idea they want directly with end users without any management, marketing, branding or legal review. By including a diverse set of employee roles, skills and life-experiences, innovation outputs increase as disruptive new ideas emerge.
7. NOTE: The project was as an early exploration and provided validation for the ability to recognize document types and create customized templates.  In February 2014, Hina Naqvi was enjoying a successful career at Adobe as a Senior Computer Scientist when she attended a Kickbox workshop. When challenged by the Kickbox process to imagine something new and different, Hina dreamed up “SmartPaper”, a new online service for content creators that intelligently determines best layout options for documents, such as flyers, brochures, resumes and tri-folds.. For the first time in her career, Hina found herself owning a project, interviewing customers in a Starbucks and discovering new problems to be solved. She fell in love with this process and decided pursue a career change based on her exposure to different aspects of product creation during Kickbox. In October 2014, Hina became a Product Manager at Adobe. In January 2017, she was promoted to Senior Product Manager.
8. IdeaBox: IdeaBox is a program run by Mastercard’s innovation arm, Mastercard Labs, with the aim of developing game-changing products and services – those that are deemed unique and commercially-viable – and of cultivating innovative skillsets. It is designed to motivate Mastercard employees to step out of the day-to-day to submit and to develop original, scalable, actionable solutions in response to a specific challenge. Selected ideas are developed and validated by employees through simple, concrete steps that potentially lead to incubation. Due to its challenging and global nature, IdeaBox relies heavily on regional representatives to promote the program and run structured ideation sessions that can spur the higher-level thinking needed for employees to submit worthy concepts. One of the groups that helps make this happen is the YoPros BRG, which has chapters spread across the globe. Mastercard Labs works hand-in-hand with the YoPros throughout the year to get employees enthusiastic about the challenges in front of them, and to support an environment in which employees can form diverse teams – functionally and geographically – that bring different approaches to the table. To date, IdeaBox has resulted in over 700 ideas for Mastercard, with submissions coming in from St. Louis all the way to Singapore. As an example, one of the winning teams is comprised of employees from Singapore and Sydney and receives mentorship from executives in Dublin and New York. The diversity of thinking and guidance has proven significant to that the success of that team and to many others.
9. IdeaBox: IdeaBox is a program run by Mastercard’s innovation arm, Mastercard Labs, with the aim of developing game-changing products and services – those that are deemed unique and commercially-viable – and of cultivating innovative skillsets. It is designed to motivate Mastercard employees to step out of the day-to-day to submit and to develop original, scalable, actionable solutions in response to a specific challenge. Selected ideas are developed and validated by employees through simple, concrete steps that potentially lead to incubation. Due to its challenging and global nature, IdeaBox relies heavily on regional representatives to promote the program and run structured ideation sessions that can spur the higher-level thinking needed for employees to submit worthy concepts. One of the groups that helps make this happen is the YoPros BRG, which has chapters spread across the globe. Mastercard Labs works hand-in-hand with the YoPros throughout the year to get employees enthusiastic about the challenges in front of them, and to support an environment in which employees can form diverse teams – functionally and geographically – that bring different approaches to the table. To date, IdeaBox has resulted in over 700 ideas for Mastercard, with submissions coming in from St. Louis all the way to Singapore. As an example, one of the winning teams is comprised of employees from Singapore and Sydney and receives mentorship from executives in Dublin and New York. The diversity of thinking and guidance has proven significant to that the success of that team and to many others.