Innovation is a people business
ESB Group HR holds seminar for Dublin Innovation week
Innovation is a central component of ESB's 2020 Strategic Framework. While there is no organisation that does not have innovation as a top priority, having innovation as a priority is not the same as making it happen. To celebrate Dublin Innovation Week, ESB Group HR, invited two experts to run an innovation workshop for 50 people in the Fitzwilliam Conference Centre.
Damian Killen, founder of the human resource consultancy Thrive, is an expert in personality type and innovation. As innovation is essentially a people business, Damian brought compelling insights into how different personality types approach innovation; the categories of ideas they are attracted to and how they are likely to act in the various stages of the innovation process.
Peter Robbins, formerly Global Head of Innovation Excellence at GlaxoSmithKline, recently set up the Innovation Foundation that is based at Nova, UCD's innovation campus. Peter presented some case studies about how large, consumer-driven companies approach innovation. Apart from high-level practical international experience, Peter lectures on Innovation for DCU and for the IMI.
Key themes of the session were: how companies leverage the talent of their own people to generate ideas; how companies source ideas from elsewhere; how they classify ideas; how they incubate ideas and amplify the elements of those ideas that have most traction; how they 'sell' ideas internally and get funding and resources to implement ideas.
Peter and Damian noted that the starting point for all innovation is an idea and that all ideas begin with a spark of creativity. Finally, delegates were given a little exercise in creativity.
Commenting afterwards, Bernard Byrne, Executive Director, Finance and Commercial, said, "It is clear to us that utilities need to change, adapt and invent new ways of delivering to our customers in the face of the extraordinary changes currently taking place in the energy sector. This places a greater focus on the need to promote innovation in ESB in a way not seen before. The Innovation Workshop was a really useful step in showing how important it is to adopt a culture that supports new ideas, as well as allowing people to get some guidance on how we can all think more creatively!"
