There’s plenty of advice about how to make companies profit busting. Bloggers screaming headlines like “Examine Your Infrastructure” and “Fine Tune Your Marketing” are a dime a dozen.
But if their dossiers on making good don’t suggest “innovation” they are barely worth reading, for this is what will put you ahead of the pack in 2013.
According to UK innovation foundation Nesta, innovative companies grow twice as fast as those that stick to old habits.
Nesta’s research The Vital 6% also shows companies of 10 or more people that experience at least 20% growth on average for three years contribute to more than half of all new jobs in the UK.
“Implement innovation and you set yourself up for long-term growth,” says Louise Marston, the foundation’s director of innovation and economic growth. “It’s one of the few proactive strategies an organisation can take to regenerate growth and fight a recession, but it doesn’t have to cost money, involve technology, or require original ideas.”
While technology, and the money to implement it can be a spur for innovation, changing processes in the workplace to foster great ideas and efficient ways of working can be free, Marston adds.
Innovation means executing new ideas to create value. One of the easiest ways to do this is through an “activity-based workplace”. This promotes innovative thinking by creating an environment where staff from various departments work together, from hot desks to building rooms specifically designed for everything from quiet study to vocal brainstorming.
They sound like basic measures, but Britain hasn’t been as quick to embrace it as countries such as Holland and Australia. “We are probably running eight to 10 years behind those countries,” says Anthony Brown, director of office refurbishment and fit-out company Overbury. “Here, many offices are still designed around departmental structures and while design in Britain is cutting edge, we’re yet to see activity-based design put at the heart of firms’ business strategies. However, the newer generations are programmed to work collaboratively and that’s the direction we’re moving.”
Media City in Salford, Macquarie Bank in London and Utrecht’s Rabobank are some of the best examples of shared workspaces. The latter was developed on the theory that the building is a modern city where each employee is an entrepreneur, accountable for their own performance in a place free of fixed rules, times and locations.
The proven outcome of this style of working is decreased staff absenteeism and attrition.
Netflix, the US video streaming and postal DVD service, takes innovation to another level. The dot com venture allows its staff to take as much holiday as they want, whenever they want. The focus is on what people get done rather than how many hours in the week they work. Their managers need only know where they are and that their work is covered.
Because introducing innovative measures can be a risky business, it is important that managers trust their staff and have a high tolerance for risk.
Netflix’s policy of no policy shows how innovation can help us achieve that holy grail of professional existence, the “work-life balance”.
“The drivers of this aspiration are the mums who don’t want to stay at home and the dads who don’t want to be workaholics,” says Monica Parker, head of workplace consultancy at Morgan Lovell.
A Florida-based homicide investigator in a past life, Parker worked with defence teams to exonerate prisoners on death row. It was during this role she became aware of the impact of space on people’s mental health, and hence campaigned for a redesign of the Pelican Bay prison.
Now, Parker’s crusade is freeing office workers from the constraints of outmoded offices. “Take an executive out of their office with a door and it sends a big message – it shows middle managers they can aspire to more than a fixed desk in their own office with a picture of the family. Collaborative working is about moving forward,” she says.
Technology may not be integral to introducing innovation, but it can’t be ignored. Given Britain’s use of mobile data and e-commerce is the highest in the world, developers will need to make big strides in using technology to add value to their projects.
This will be the year they do it, predicts David Gann, head of innovation and entrepreneurship at Imperial College: “The industry can break free of its depressed state by improving productivity and producing higher-quality buildings,” he says. Gann insists such things as Building Information Modelling (BIM), a digital tool to generate and manage data on a building throughout its life cycle, is not being used to its full potential.
He says: “Digital systems will continue to play an important part in improving the performance of buildings, but we need to link these with urban infrastructure to create ‘smart districts’. Property directors should be thinking about how to integrate digital infrastructure with the physical to make places more valuable.”
Gann adds: “What we’re going to see is developers working more with companies like IBM, Cisco, Apple and Google and some of the really good small companies coming out of Tech City in London.”
Case study: ARUP gives spark to new ideas
As an engineering and design consultancy, innovation is built into Arup’s DNA. Most recently, the firm has developed such technology as the HaloIPT wireless charging plate for electric cars, which has even got Transport for London excited.
But it is down to an innovative scheme within Arup that allows these inventions to develop. Any employee can pitch for time, money and expertise from in-house specialists to research, and hopefully give life, to a new idea.
Arup director Peter Gist says: “We try to create an environment where people can think imaginatively and although we understand only one or two of the ideas will come to something, it’s important we at least allow them to be explored.”
Innovators at the ready, times are a-changing in 2013
The boffins at Nesta have made some bold predictions about the year ahead:
1 Predictive tools, such as Wonga’s algorithms for financial risk, and the PARR (patients at risk of re-entering hospital) system used by GPs, will become mainstream. We will become adept at probability and better decision-makers.
2 At least three high street retail outlets will step into the rental market, just like Amazon did with its text book rental service, on the back of the success of Chegg.com, and BMW, Peugeot and Volkswagen did when car-sharing became popular. This “sharing economy” will grow and the knock-on effects will be dramatic.
3 Baby boomers, now in their 50s and 60s, will become an important cornerstone for economic success. They are more likely to set up successful new businesses and be happier and more solvent than their younger counterparts. One-time rebels, they will create one very lucrative market.
4 Robots will begin to affect our rate of progress. Not humanoid robots, but the ones hidden in software – Apple’s intelligent personal assistant Siri, the satnav, Google’s self-driving car. They’ll soon replace our hands and our brains. So what of us?
5 The UK will get its first social science park – a high-tech experimental workshop, hardwired to universities, where prototypes of public innovation can be developed.
rebecca.kent@estatesgazette.com
