Enterprise IT teams have a lot of responsibilities. We need to run 24/7/365 operations, give great customer service, develop new business capabilities, keep the hackers out, refresh the technology on lifecycle, orchestrate M&A activities, implement business projects, and somewhere down the list is innovation. Yes, the business expects us to innovate. It’s part of the job.

The term, innovation, has some connotation for us. In my role, I buy technology and services from tech companies. Those tech companies have R&D departments that focus exclusively on innovation. Sometimes, as a customer, I get to tour their innovation centers and see the cool things they are working on. I think that becomes the mental standard that enterprise IT needs to reach. Somehow, if we aren’t building an artificial intelligence autonomous robots that harnesses cloud machine learning and mixed reality to disrupt markets, then we aren’t really innovating.

So, what does innovation in enterprise IT look like?

Innovation is seizing the opportunity to change. Look around you. What’s wrong with the world? Plenty, for sure. Much of it is beyond your control. Let’s zero it in a bit. What’s wrong with the world in your immediate circle of influence? What problems can be turned into opportunities when you apply technology to the equation? This is about possibility thinking. Seeing what can be, instead of only what is.

Innovation doesn’t have to be patentable. It doesn’t need to be original. It doesn’t need to be marketable. It just needs to be novel in your context. If you can use someone else’s learnings from another environment and tweak it to solve a problem in your environment, then you’ve innovated.

How do you create a culture of innovation in enterprise IT?

Here at CHS, we decided to get intentional about it. Many in our IT leadership team read Daniel Pink’s book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. In that book, we learned about companies that set aside time for IT employees to work on projects of their choosing. This created an innovative culture and increased employee engagement and overall job satisfaction.

Rather than do a one-day blitz event, we decided to spread it out over a season. Here’s our method. Take it and use it at your company:

1. In May, we start generating buzz about the upcoming innovation event, that we entitled “INVENT” as a contraction of INnovation eVENT.
2. In June, we open a SharePoint site for idea submission. We ask all IT employees to submit innovation ideas to the site, and we even solicit the business for some ideas.
3. In July, we allocate up to 40 hours per team member to work on INVENT. They self-select ideas. They self-organize their teams.
4. In August, the INVENT teams present their projects in front of their peers. We invite the whole IT department to attend the presentations, whether or not they directly participated.
5. In September, we invite the INVENT teams to shepherd their projects through our Architecture Review Board for production consideration. Not every project is destined for production, but some of those innovative ideas have gone on to permanently change the way we work.

This is our second year going through this sequence. This year, we added a weekly video podcast that aired on our internal social media channel. I interviewed different participants each week to keep the excitement going, encourage the teams, and inspire the creative process.

So, where does innovation come from?

Every member of your team. People closest to the challenges see the opportunity and use their technical brilliance to solve interesting problems. As a leader, you need to be the one to provide the time, empowerment, and encouragement. Do you run innovation events at your company? Share your methods and learnings in the comments below.