Why does Elbit need an innovation community?
To embed a culture of innovation in the organization and grow it from the bottom up. The more people on the ground know about innovation, the better they'll be at pushing interesting initiatives upward and influencing the organization.
What is the innovation community and how does it work?
We meet once a month and give community members the tools to understand and apply innovation. We have a community WhatsApp group where people share things. COVID hit 2 months after we launched, but we didn't let it throw us off. We moved everything online. If anything, it may have made us stronger.
After a few meetings, a community member came to me with feedback: the meetings weren't enough. He wanted to hear more about technologies, and he reeled off a whole list of ideas we could put into practice. I acted on it right away, and we added some new content. One example is a TED talk. We also started bringing in outside speakers, which is very innovative and far from trivial in our organization.
How was the community founded?
At Elbit there's an innovation leaders course that teaches tools from the world of entrepreneurship, with content tailored to the company. I took the course myself, and at the end, when I got my certificate, I realized I couldn't really do anything with it on my own. That was the moment I understood we needed a community. We worked with a "community canvas," a method that helps define what a community is and what its goals are. We decided to gather people who care about innovation and ask them what they needed, and that's how we got input on what the community should look like. We decided we wanted a monthly meeting, and we defined its content. The beauty of the canvas is that it balances the value the community gives the organization with the value it gives its members. That's the mindset I came away with.
Our rule is that any employee in the company who's interested in innovation can be part of this community, but in the beginning we didn't want to add people too quickly. It was important to us to establish the community first and make sure it was giving value to its members and to the organization. We started with "the innovators," the people who had already taken the course. At the fifth or sixth meeting, we held a session about expanding the community. We thought about how we wanted to do it, and we decided on member-brings-member. We went from 15 to 30. Members brought in people who fit the format, and that's how the community gained momentum. Bit by bit, people started hearing about it, reaching out and asking to join. Today we're 50 people, all through member-brings-member.
When did you realize the community was succeeding?
There were 2 moments when I realized something special was happening here. The first was during onboarding. I sent an email to someone who had asked to join through member-brings-member, and I CC'd their managers to keep them in the loop. Then suddenly a manager stopped me in the hallway and asked if I'd seen his email. When I opened it, I saw he'd written that there was another employee who'd be a good fit. That was proof that word about the community was spreading, even though we had never promoted it as a community.
The second was innovation on the ground. We pulled together a subgroup from the community to talk about how to bring innovation into day-to-day work in the product line, and then held another meeting on how to actually do it. We took that to the head of the product line, and today the solution includes a structured, recurring work process that the line head has approved and that's being rolled out right now.
These successes give you the drive to keep proposing ideas. Right now we're thinking about how to bring the innovation process into community members' performance reviews, so that it becomes a real part of their job.
Cracking the win-win: how do you make sure both the community and the organization get value?
The win for the community: exposure to new worlds of content and to the most creative and interesting ideas across a range of fields. It's a golden opportunity to add a huge space for action on top of the day job, one that helps community members grow personally and professionally, especially when they see their ideas take shape. That's an amazing feeling of impact.
The win for the organization: embedding a culture of innovation, and strengthening collaboration between people and teams who otherwise would have had no reason to meet.
What challenges did you face?
- The role is big and takes a huge amount of time. I watched a TED talk about how much time we have in a week and how we use it. My calendar is packed and meticulously managed, and I'm very selective about what goes into it.
- To this day, one of our biggest challenges in the division is getting everyone aligned on what innovation is: what the division's innovation leader actually considers innovation. That way, when people talk about innovation, they're all talking about the same thing.
- When I founded the community, I didn't know what to do. I took a course, I went through a mentoring process, and I grew a lot personally.
When you want something and you believe in its value, you have to act.
Tips for community success
- In organizations with no awareness of innovation, you need someone who's crazy about it. Someone who will get the wheels turning in the right direction and become an innovation leader.
- A tip for internal organizational communities: believe, dream, and take initiative. When you want something and you believe in its value, you simply have to start doing it.
- Stay mentally flexible along the way. What you started with might need to change, and that's part of life in a community that's always in motion.