Leadership Tip #11: InnovationStationSM Experience

Brought to you by Raytheon Professional Services
By Bernie Saboe, Raytheon Professional Services

Economic spirals, wide spread cost cuts and increased pressures for operational performance, often drain organizations of their full creative potential. The intense cadence for business results and growth is insatiable. It is during these uncertain times that leave the workforce wondering, “how can we, I, survive?” During these harsh business conditions is precisely the time when we need innovation most.

No matter where in the world you are working, daily schedules fill up with emerging issues that need to be solved. This leaves little room in the day for creativity and innovation. How often do you carve out dedicated time to apply innovative thinking on personal or professional problems? Where does the inspiration for innovative ideas come from? How can I turn an individual creative thought into a wildly successful innovation? InnovationStation Experience has demonstrated techniques that arms today’s workforce with the toolset for innovation.

InnovationStation Tips:

1. Be There: Make space in your busy day and dedicate it towards creative thinking on a specific topic. Separate yourself from the distractions and clear your mind of the noise. With your mind’s eye, examine the subject from multiple angles and perspectives.


2. Set the Stage: Explore your imagination and practice collaborative idea generation. Most great innovations stem from sharing the creative ideas with others. It is then that infant concepts gain dimension and mature into brilliance. Put the idea into a context and framework for others to understand; set the stage.


3. Tell the Story: Innovative ideas are countless; many die an early, sometimes premature death. Turning an idea into reality requires that others can connect to the concept. You need to create a powerful, positive intellectual and emotional connection to idea. Presenting your innovative idea in the form of a story can be the source of inspiration for others to further the idea into reality.

The beauty of this approach is its simplicity and flexibility, both essential for success. Our problems are complex enough, we do not need to further complicate our work environment and confuse our people. Already the InnovationStation Experience has changed the outcome of business strategy, global learning, program execution, product designs, adjacent market growth, training administration, user interface design and personal career development.

At Raytheon, hundreds of employees have applied InnovationStation Experience as part of the personal career development. These people are creating non-traditional ways to innovate their careers that enable business success.