- Large, established organizations struggle with innovation due to rigid systems and processes that have built up over decades, making change difficult. However, they are still interested in innovating to improve efficiency and stay competitive. - One challenge is that it's difficult for large companies to collect and assess the many ideas generated by employees, which are often forgotten. A UK software company called Wazoku offers tools to help large organizations formalize innovation initiatives and implement employee ideas. - By using Wazoku's software, companies like Waitrose are able to collect staff ideas submitted from various devices, and identify those with potential for large-scale improvements and cost savings. This helps transform the traditional "suggestion box" process.

1. A Fond Farewell To The
Suggestion Box -- Disrupting
Innovation Management
According to conventional wisdom, small entrepreneurial companies are, by
their very nature, agile and innovative. They can turn on a sixpence and put
news ideas into operation in a matter of weeks or even days. By instinct, they
disrupt markets by seeking out new and better ways of doing things. In
contrast, the large, well-established organisation struggles to innovate. With
its systems and practices bedded-in over decades, change is something that
tends to happen painfully slowly.
It’s a caricature, of course. Large organisations can be slow in implementing
change but that doesn’t mean they are disinterested in innovation. At one
level, boards know that improved internal processes create efficiencies that
ultimately feed through to the bottom line. Equally important, in the age of the
challenger brand, businesses in all sectors know that resting on their laurels
isn’t an option. If they can’t, for example, keep up with customer expectations
then smaller, disruptive competitors will move in and gleefully shave off slices
of market share.
Why Is Change So Difficult
So here’s the question. If large organisations are keen to innovate why do they
find at so difficult? Perhaps one reason is that once a business hits a certain
size it becomes increasingly difficult to harvest and assess the ideas generated
by members of staff.

2. Think of it this way. From car factories to supermarket floors, the people who
work day-in and day- out with existing business processes can probably
pinpoint dozens of small inefficiencies that make working life just a little bit
more difficult while also acting as a drag on performance. Those same people
can probably suggest how things might be improved.
So they make suggestions to line managers who either ‘mentally file’ the
proposal or on a good day mention it at the next brainstorming session. The
problem is that no one owns the process of filtering the suggestions and
implementing the best of them. Consequently they are forgotten.
Certainly that’s the view of Wazoku, a UK-based tech company company
offering software tools to enable large organisations to collect, manage and put
into practice ideas proposed by members of staff and managers. Founded in
2011, the company was named as one of Britain’s top 50 must disruptive
startups by business lender Everline in 2013 and has also been hailed as a
leading player in innovation management by Gartner. Last week Wazoku
published a new report – Everyday Innovation – highlighting some of the
innovation challenges that major companies face.
Throwing Ideas Away
According to the report – based on a poll of companies employing an average
of 5,200 people – British businesses are typically throwing away around 1,800
ideas every year. Meanwhile, the average employee is contributing around 6
ideas a year. Overall, less than half (43%) of the ideas proposed will be taken
forward.
Wazoku says the problem is a lack process, coupled with a failure to create an
environment where employees are encouraged to contribute.
So what can a young British software company do to turn around the
innovation record of well-established businesses? Well, as CEO and co-
founder Simon Hillacknowledges, Wazoku is not a consultancy or professional
services firm. In other words, it won’t be sending in teams of consultants to
ring changes. “What we do is provide the software that allows organisations to

3. bring some formal process to innovation initiatives across the organisation,”
he says.
In practice this typically involves managers deciding on priority problems and
inviting staff to table their own solutions which are collected and collated via
the Wazoku system. Staff can make suggestions via office workstations or
through software apps downloaded onto their own devices, such as tablets,
phones or laptops.
Supermarket group Waitrose already uses the system and as Operational
Improvement Manager Stuart Eames notes, the ability to post ideas from
external devices is particularly important when staff don’t have regular or easy
access to in-house systems. “And what we find is people are posting ideas at
lunchtime and from home,” he says.
As Eames sees it, the holy grail is an idea that scales up. For instance, a simple
proposal on stacking carrots to them easier to bring out from the storeroom to
the main store may mean a small improvement in efficiency at one or two
locations. On the other hand, an idea that can be rolled out in every store –
such as a reduction in the time spent processing transactions – can feed
through to massive savings. At branch level, it might be difficult to identify
the ideas that will scale up. The Wazoku system, brings suggestions from far
flung reaches of the organisation to the decision making center.
Innovation Culture
Of course, this twenty first century take on the suggestion box depends for its
success in members of staff being persuaded to spend time and energy coming
up with innovative ideas. This can be achieved through financial incentives,
but Hill argues that is not the prime motivator. “You can build in cash
incentives but most people are not after that. “What we’re seeing is a young
working culture in which people are willing to put ideas into the process as a
way of having a voice and building career.”
Four years into its Journey, Wazoku has names such as Prudential Insurance,
the BBC, Aviva and Waitrose on its client list and is expanding into the US. It’s

4. an example of a young, innovative company that is exporting its ideas to large
organisations that are hungry for change.