By Jennifer Ruzek Liebermann
“How do you inspire and enable innovation in a large organization?”
That’s the question I grapple with daily as director of Kaiser Permanente’s health care innovation center. I’ve observed that it isn’t sufficient to have a dedicated Innovation Center, an Innovation & Advanced Technology Group, or in-house Innovation Consultancy design group – all of which Kaiser Permanente has. The real question to solve is: “How do you create a culture that enables innovation throughout an organization?”
To explore answers to that, this week I am joining with physicians, nurses and design thinking, quality and innovation experts from the United Kingdom’s National Health Service and Kaiser Permanente for three days in South Devon, England, at the NHS Horizon Centre for Innovation, Education & Research in Healthcare, to share successful failures and best practices in innovation.
One contribution the NHS already has shared with the extended health care innovation community is a guide that helps leaders enhance the conditions for innovation: “Creating a Culture of Innovation.” Given that organizational leaders’ behaviors have a disproportionate influence on creating a culture that either hinders or aids innovation, Lynn Maher and Helen Bevan of the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement and Paul Plsek distilled the organizational research on innovation into a helpful “how to” guide outlining the seven dimensions of culture that support innovation. These principles, summarized below, can be applied to any organization.
So how can you begin building your own innovative culture — and how have we used these principles at Kaiser Permanente?
Risk-taking: Establish a climate in which people feel OK trying out new ideas by not shutting down ideas before they’ve been vetted. Leaders should demonstrate they are more interested in learning from failure than punishing people for it.
To foster innovative thinking at Kaiser Permanente, our Information Technology leadership created an Innovation Fund, an internal program that provides seed funding and support to teams of doctors and employees to facilitate the rapid prototyping of novel IT ideas and diffusion of successful innovations. Leadership also created iLabs, an innovation lab that serves as a technology research, advisory and software prototyping group that works with Kaiser Permanente innovators to help develop technology solutions for health care.
Resources: Resources are meant in the broadest sense of the term here. The traditional definition signifies an organizational commitment to innovation, but resources need not always be concrete. Time, permission and autonomy to innovate may be what is needed. For example, Kaiser Permanente’s Innovation Fund not only provides seed funding, but access to mentors and tools to jumpstart innovation.
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