How innovation can be fostered in large training providers is the focus of my ‘Inside VET’ column in Campus Review, 14 Sept 2005.

For the column, I interviewed Box Hill Institute of TAFE CEO John Maddock, following his Institute being awarded, for the second year in a row, Victoria’s Large Training Provider of the Year.  Some excerpts from the interview follow.

How does innovation start in your institute?

Innovation springs from the way we manage the whole of the institute and the way people within the institute operate and behave. The innovations are supported at all levels, but the ideas come from our people and they get developed up and it’s really a team effort. We go out of our way within the institute to set up mechanisms for individuals and teams to get the opportunity to put forward new ideas and then we look for ways to provide support. We strive to create a climate where all staff are leaders.

How do you involve your clients in innovation?

The staff become extremely passionate not only about the innovation but about the client group they’re doing the innovation for, and that passion then starts to flow over to our client group who also start to become passionate. And then what happens is that the relationship between the individual staff members in the institute and our client base or the enterprise or the community or the student becomes more powerful: it creates an energy that is very hard to describe, and that is what we are trying to achieve all of the time.

Do you have a planned, systematic approach to innovation?

Our planned approach to innovation is deliberate. We believe that if we can set the plans in place at the front-end and make sure we have a balance between the management of the operation and the strategic directions we want to take, then what you’ve got is a platform for reacting when you need to react, for being opportunistic when you need to be opportunistic. But if you don’t have a good plan in place at the front end, what happens is that people continue to do the same things all of the time and they’re not constantly challenging what they’re doing.

How do you sustain innovations?

We work very hard to sustain innovations, and so do our partners. We look at what we need to do to reinvest. We don’t just look at a new approach and say it will be alright, for all time: the whole philosophy of continuous improvement is something we really believe in and we work hard at trying to do it. I talk to my staff all the time about the one-percenters, how important the one-percenters are and how each and every one of us has control over those one-percenters. It is that sort of philosophy and the hard work that staff do in identifying and then making it happen, in doing those one-percenters, that keeps the improvements going and sustains the innovation. 

From this interview and from my other research, I have found that innovation has the following benefits:

• Re-invigorates the organisation
• Refreshes its products and services
• Improves its customer responsiveness
• Delivers its customers superior value
• Demonstrates its staff capabilities
• Increases its uniqueness
• Underpins its sustainable competitive advantage.