How to Support Innovation for Lasting Transformation in Your Organization

We lead a team of Ohio State researchers driving change in innovation culture through a contract with the U.S. Department of Defense, where a key challenge is aligning, prioritizing and adopting innovations in acquisition operations. This work is funded by the Acquisition Innovation Research Center, the DOD’s applied academic research arm focused on accelerating innovation in acquisition policy and practice to better meet warfighter needs. 

Our experts from the John Glenn College of Public Affairs and the College of Engineering uncovered what promotes — and blocks — innovation in defense acquisition, and we developed the Innovation Alliance Program designed to foster a healthy innovation culture.  

Danielle M. Moyer, executive director of the U.S. Army Contracting Command –  Aberdeen Proving Ground, emphasizes the importance of innovation: “Our team at the Army Contracting Command – Aberdeen Proving Ground is our greatest strength. By giving everyone the space to think and act freely, we tap into all kinds of innovation. When our folks are motivated, they make amazing things happen!” 

To assess intervention ideas designed at improving adoption of organizational change, we used novel interviewing techniques and an empirically based framework of workshops developed at the Cognitive Systems Engineering Lab at Ohio State’s College of Engineering.  

These tools, which we adapted for acquisitions work, have already been used in healthcare, aviation and other high-stakes environments. 

Then we combined those to advance the Innovation Alliance Program, a practical approach for embedding innovation within the DOD. 

The program creates a method for continuous monitoring to identify signals of barriers and facilitators to a healthy innovation culture; a decision-making model and tool to interpret those signals and target improvement efforts; and workshops to implement a process to stress test, refine and scale high-potential innovations. In doing so, it addresses a critical challenge in the DOD: how to ensure promising local innovations are not lost but instead matured and mobilized to create lasting, enterprise-wide impact. 

Along the way, we’ve discovered insights that could be helpful to any public service entity aiming to support innovation.  

We found primary organizational attributes that support innovative acquisitions behaviors: making room for failure and risk-taking, fostering organizational learning, aligning team goals, collaborating internally and externally, and supporting autonomy. 

Also, certain systemic pressures in acquisitions served to either strengthen or erode those attributes. In your own organization, you’ll likely recognize these pressures and how they can promote or impede innovation. The most frequent in acquisitions were policies, processes and regulations; time constraints; innovation prioritization; the balance of work demands, budget constraints and resources; personnel turnover; reliance on routines; political exposure or public sector scrutiny; personal reputation; external events; and organizational relationships.  

We found that leadership support plays a powerful influence on helping or hindering innovative behaviors.  

Here are takeaways you can consider as you lead your own team:  

• Availability: Leaders are available and accessible to their team, encouraging them to find solutions but providing support when needed. 
• Feedback: Getting more frequent feedback from leadership and customers creates opportunities to realign goals across levels, address and learn from issues, and generate new insights and innovations.
• Openness: Leadership makes it “okay” not to know everything. Leaders encourage people to ask questions and share knowledge to enable a culture of openness to learn. Leaders provide “top cover” for teams and individuals experimenting with innovative solutions. 
• Bridging: When the originator of an innovation leaves the team, leadership or another team member acts as a throughline for an innovation, orchestrating the handoff and providing the ongoing momentum.
• Accounting for tradeoffs: Goal alignment specifically on the risk versus reward tradeoff is important to getting an innovation off the ground.
• Authority-responsibility alignment: Leaders allow people to have the authority, flexibility and freedom to complete work they are responsible for through their own means. 
• Goal alignment: A leader needs to ensure that people and groups, moving horizontally and vertically through the organization, share the same goal and understand their role in reaching it. One person in the right position of authority who does not share common goals can stop an innovation in its tracks. 
• Incoming orientation toward innovation: A change in leadership greatly impacts the goals and innovation capability of the team. New leaders who have a desire to innovate can create an environment that allows more risks to be taken and boundaries to be pushed, but those who prioritize status quo can halt previously developed innovations as new ideas. 

From an organizational perspective, the spread of innovation is essential to fostering institutional adaptability and resilience. When supported by leadership and institutional mechanisms, grassroots innovations can be assessed for scalability and integrated more broadly across your enterprise when it matters most.