3.4.

High involvement in innovation

- The underlying creative skills and problem-solving abilities are possessed by everyone.
Although each individual may only be able to develop limited, incremental innovations,
the sum of these efforts can have far-reaching impacts.
+ A good illustration of this is the “quality miracle,” which was worked by the Japanese
manufacturing industry in the postwar years, and which owed much to what they term
kaizen – continuous improvement. Firms such as Toyota and Matsushita receive millions
of suggestions for improvements every year from their employees – and the vast majority
of these are implemented
Case study 3.5: XYZ’s success as one of the best factories in the UK.
 The approach taken with the workforce. This is an organizationwhere training
matters – investment is well above the average and everyone receives a significant
training input, not only in their own particular skills area but also across a wide
range of tasks and skills
 Little improvement projects – kaizens as they call them – are everywhere.
-Case study 3.6 charts the adoption of high-involvement innovation in different
organizzations, some of the key finding were as follows:
+ around 80% of organizations were aware of the concept and its relevance, but its actual
implementation, particularly in more developed forms, involved around half of the firms
+ The average number of years that the firms had been working with high-involvement
innovation on a systematic basis was 3.8, supporting the view that this is not a “quick fix”
+ High involvement is still something of a misnomer for many firms
+ Motives for making the journey down this road vary widely but cluster particularly
around the themes of quality improvement, cost reduction, and productivity
improvement.
+ lmost all high-involvement innovation activities take place on an “inline” basis – that
is, as part of the normal working pattern rather than as a voluntary “offline” activity.
Most of this activity takes place in some form of group work although around a third of
the activity is on an individual basis
-Table 3.3. High-involvement Innovation in German and Austrian Companies
A study conducted by the Employee Involvement Association in the United States
suggested that companies can expect to save close to £200 annually per employee by
implementing a suggestion system
-Research 3.6 identifies four enabling factors to support employee-led innovation.
+ Time-Out – to give employees the space in their working day for creative thought
+ Expansive Roles – to help employees move beyond the con fines of their assigned job
+ Competitions – to stimulate action and to get the creative juices flowing
+ Open Forums – to give employees a sense of direction and to foster collaboration.
-The difficulty is less about getting started than about keeping it going long enough to
make a real difference.