Kathy Harris

In 2009, most organizations are consumed with economic issues and the imperative to reduce the cost of doing business. These organizations need innovations with transformative potential and low capital outlay. Under these constraints, the focus must be on current assets – projects, people, methods, capabilities and culture – as the sources of innovation. 

There is another reality — you can’t innovate without some money; however, you can innovate within your existing budget. This means finding ways to divert people to innovations and importantly, to stop marginal projects and free up resources. If you’re not inspecting your project portfolio and confirming business cases, move this up on your priority list. Here’s the link to an article on HP and their cost cutting work — HP reduced the number of active projects from 1240 to 700.  

So, assuming you can find some resources (and yes, you can), here’s a starting list of where to look for low cost, high return innovation. There’s a Column A and Column B. Add your own and mix or match to find an opportunity. 

Column A: Functional areas that can be changed with low capital outlay and offer transformational opportunity:

• Management
• Organization
• Decision making speed and quality
• Governance effectiveness and quality
• Meetings
• Status reporting

Column B: Actions and options for transformation:

• Scale down to become more nimble
• Improve decision frameworks and decision models
• Use social networks to scavenge resource time and expertise
• Use internal crowd sourcing to identify cost containment ideas
• Overtly shift your culture.
• Simplify organizations, methodologies and processes
• Share risks and rewards (with employees, suppliers, customers)
• Align, align, align to what’s important

Here’s an example for Organization: Evaluate whether your organization design accurately reflects business objectives (e.g., retain customers since retention is critical in an economic downturn). If the answer is no, then you have an opportunity to better align teams and their work with your business objectives and to overtly shift your culture.