The Structure Innovation Checkup is a tool and component of the Ten Types Of Innovation macro method (also described here). The third of the Ten Types Of Innovation describes innovative organizational structures of a company – personnel, material or immaterial.
Distinctive and innovative structures create value – from outstanding talent management to sophisticated assembly of heavy machinery. Even fixed costs and tasks can be improved through structural innovation. This includes areas such as human resources, research and development, and IT. Ideally, such a structure attracts outstanding talent as potential employees – through a perfect working environment and a performance level unmatched by competitors.
Good innovative structures are characterized, for example, by a functioning incentive system that motivates employees to work toward a set goal, by standardizations that reduce costs and break down complexities, and by in-house training to guarantee continuous education.
Structural innovations in particular are difficult to copy from competitors, because they always contain their own peculiarities that are perfectly tailored to the organization in question and, combined with the investments required and made for this purpose, offer an advantage for years to come.
Successful structural innovations in practice:
– Whole Foods Market: teams are the core value at Whole Foods. An extreme type of decentralization characterizes the company: Each location independently determines the hiring of employees, purchasing, warehousing and the presentation of goods.
– Southwest Airlines: Before Southwest bought out the low-cost carrier AirTran, the American airline flew only the Boeing 737 aircraft model. In this way, all processes of individual flights, loadings and idle times were standardized and made less expensive.
– Trinity Health: The clinics in the Trinity Health network have a sophisticated IT infrastructure. This provides physicians and nurses with spatially unrestricted access to patient data, is used for quality assurance, and is even used for telemedicine to provide medical advice to patients in remote rural areas.
