Page 187 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

176 HBR Leader’s Handbook

Over four years, nearly 100 ideas were funded, many of which have been
put in the market and have given the overall fund a very healthy return on
investment.
In addition, many of Thomson Reuters’s innovation initiatives have
helped make organic innovation part of the culture. Driven by an executive
sponsor and a full-time innovation leader, these have included:

• Building innovation metrics such as number of ideas in each
stage of the innovation pipeline, the overall participation level of
employees by rank and location, and survey results on employees’
sense that they can be innovative and receive recognition for their
efforts

• Appointing “innovation champions” in every business. Each busi-
nesses and corporate function designated a senior high-potential
manager to help implement programs and processes to achieve
the new goals and metrics. In addition, the champions created a
common terminology for and built an online Thomson Reuters
network filled with resources that employees could use to educate
themselves about the concepts and practices of innovation

• Orchestrating a communications campaign with blogs, articles,
and video interviews with internal innovators and other employ-
ees’ views on innovation

• Organizing enterprise innovation workshops, with representatives
from all parts of the business, to identify and plan efforts that
would drive new or existing products or process solutions across
the company’s platforms

• Launching an “operational innovation fund,” similar to the Cata-
lyst Fund, to encourage more creative back-end software develop-
ment for operations centers

• Establishing Innovation Challenges to crowdsource solutions
plaguing an area of the business or a customer group