Accelerating Innovation Mission and Purpose
“Accelerating innovation” is a new program in OIT that provides incentives for experimenting with new ideas and technologies. This new program encourages staff to develop proofs of concept that can be evaluated for broader implementation. The goal is to promote a culture of innovation here in OIT.
“Accelerating Innovation” encourages all OIT staff to expand innovative thinking into their daily work and projects.
With this program we offer a web-based platform to openly share and collaborate on ideas – OIT Innovation Channel. Using this platform, you or your colleagues can quickly define and refine ideas for building proofs of concept.
Selected high impact ideas will receive executive-level support and incentives for building a Proof of Concept.
The goal is to support experimentation with new ideas, capture lessons learned from low-risk failures, and elevate OIT to more nimbly respond to evolving customer needs and technology changes.
This informational website talks more about this initiative and broader concepts around innovation.
What’s OIT seeking to achieve with this initiative?
- Grow OIT’s culture of enabling and fostering innovation
- Educate people about the Innovation Framework
- Communicate our values re: innovation, creativity, experimentation, risk taking, and learning from failure.
- Increase activity and awareness around innovative ideas and outcomes
- Individual or team level – Ideas that don’t need any resources
- Cross-team or departmental level – Ideas that may need resources
- Influence and guide experimentation – promote continual improvement
- Encourage greater experimentation to engage people and increase experience that could be tapped later
- Define and refine needs/ideas first, then conceptualize a solution
- Experiment and build a proof of concept for “strong” ideas
- Keep this initiative simple
- No top-down complexity, be flexible/adaptable to feedback, and use available tools
What types of priorities and ideas is OIT encouraging be addressed (what’s “in” and what’s “out”)?
- Anything’s possible. Here are some thoughts:
- It’s about experimentation, creativity, and innovation – it’s not about telling someone else how they can do their job or do their job better
- Some ideas may be radical and totally new – other great ideas may be replicating and improving something that’s being done successfully elsewhere
- It’s not only about developing or implementing products or technologies – it may be about doing things in a new way or flipping a traditional business model
- It’s about OIT staying current as technologies continue to evolve in radical and unpredictable ways
What values is OIT promoting?
We’ll always maintain our excellent service levels and keep our broad portfolios of systems and services healthy. We can attain all this in new and useful ways with increased:
- Experimentation
- Work with it to really understand it
- More experience/experimentation enables us all to respond faster and more effectively with new challenges and evolving technologies
- Some experiments may not pay off immediately – but they may set the stage for the future
- Creativity
- There’s rarely one right answer or approach
- Many of our traditions are tried and true; and we need to rigorously maintain our professional responsibilities – we could also be open to building on our past experience in new and different ways
- Innovation
- Reframe problems into opportunities
- Identify and leverage strategic value
- Innovation = New AND Useful
- Take Risks
- Take “measured” risks and expect to learn from failures – document and share both failures and successes – review past failures to see what might inspire a different approach
- Others? Let us know what else you value by commenting on this page