The gold in the mine...
- John Bessant
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Harnessing the power of high involvement innovation
‘With every pair of hands you get a free brain!’
That’s the promise of high involvement innovation (HII) - engaging everyone in the organisation in the innovation mission. And it’s got a lot to offer.
Take the case of Denny’s shipyard in Dumbarton, Scotland. They introduced a simple HII scheme to encourage anyone in their 350-strong workforce to make suggestions on how they could improve the company’s performance. Within their first year they’d managed to cut the time to build a warship from six months to four while also improving quality, adding new features and reducing waste.
Impressive stuff - but also a reminder that HII isn’t new. That story comes from 1871! Nor is theirs an isolated case; organized HII was happening at least a hundred years before that. The 8th Shogun of Japan, Yoshimuni Tokugawa, tried it out in 1721 with his “Meyasubako”, a box placed at the entrance of the Edo Castle for written suggestions from his subjects.
And the British navy pioneered a similar scheme in 1770, asking its sailors and marines for their ideas — significantly reassuring them that such suggestions would not carry the risk of punishment!
From pioneering efforts like John Patterson’s attempt to harness what he called ‘the hundred headed brain’ in the National Cash Register company in 1892 (eagerly imitated by the Eastman Kodak company in 1896) through to Toyota’s famous kaizen commitment in the 1970s which mobilised over 50 million suggestions and helped put them at the forefront of productivity performance in the global car industry.
The evidence is clear - HII works. Building on ideas from across the organization can contribute significant competitive advantage and deliver multi-million dollar savings. As companies as diverse as Haier, Conoco-Philips, Liberty Global, Fujitsu or Nokia continue to attest.
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