Pollen8
Strategise for innovation success in 2022

As companies mature, innovation can lose its way to inertia, resulting in growth stagnation. To avoid this it’s important for organisations to maintain the right balance between attending to current operations, while also identifying opportunities to innovate. Only then will they be able to achieve continuous growth and remain competitive throughout their corporate life cycles. When it comes to finding opportunities to innovate, organisations should look to their most valuable asset; their employees. These are the people that are perfectly placed to understand the biggest challenges their business, their customers and the industry face.

However, sustained innovation is still unrecognised for many businesses. More often than not, we see innovative activities happening in silos across the business, lacking the right direction and focus to drive impactful change. In reality, successful innovation is hinged on a complex system of processes, mindset, networks of sponsors and support to drive innovative ideas forward. What will generate genuine change for organisations, is the creation of an infrastructure for innovation. A system that enables the surfacing of ideas, supports the development of ideas into products, services, or ventures, and equips organisations to track and measure their innovation activities. A noteworthy example of how this is being achieved is through the Pollen8 platform, which combines the right structure and tools to turn good ideas into impactful innovations.

The company combines years of consulting knowledge with its own SaaS platform to assist clients in developing cutting-edge solutions, identifying inefficiencies, and fostering an innovative culture within their organisation. It enables leaders to align and manage innovative activity based on strategic priorities, surface quality ideas from across the business, as well as track and report on the progress of projects. “The simple yet powerful way for organisations to accelerate innovation is to leverage their most important asset, which is their employees.” Says Olivia Law, the Commercial Director of Pollen8. To do this, employees must feel engaged and inspired to participate.

They should feel educated around what innovation means to the business and motivated to help drive the change.

For this, Pollen8’s platform becomes a ‘home’ for innovation. It’s a space where employees can go to find relevant articles, success stories, tutorials and case studies. This works to build a deep understanding of what innovation means to the organisation - which ideas are in scope and which are not - and empowers them to participate.

A challenge often faced by complex organisations is how to achieve transparency, consistency, and quality of innovative activities when you’re working across multiple geographies and lines of service. To support this the platform provides a structured application process, guided with tutorials - ensuring that submissions are both consistent and high-quality, regardless of employee position, market or geography.



To make the process more effective, Pollen8 encourages collaboration across teams and includes third-party expertise. The company believes that diverse thinking is key for real innovation, with success rarely achieved when one perspective overshadows the whole process, defaulting to the status quo. This is why submitted ideas are taken through a structured review process, inviting the expertise of specialists from both across the business and externally to feedback on each idea. Where Pollen8 sees this having particular strength is with the pertinent challenges of the Net Zero agenda. “As the world moves to a sustainable future, innovative solutions for the net-zero agenda will emerge, combining multiple technologies and expertise.” says Olivia Law. For the potential to be fully realised, it will require successful collaboration across geographies, industries and expertise.

Finally, leaders are able to track innovation projects from across the whole organisation in the Pollen8 Portfolio Management tool. This is a comprehensive dashboard that shows the progress of strategically aligned ventures - giving leaders the confidence to know when to invest in, and just as importantly when to kill projects.

An example of where this has been particularly critical is when a key client had invested millions of pounds into the same technology across two different business divisions. The mishap was a result of the innovation process being conducted without any real structure or transparency. If they had centralised the process while bringing in transparency, enormous amounts of money could have been saved. To address this, Pollen8 partnered with them and swiftly set up processes to track and manage the progress of each idea. Important information was flagged, and the client was also notified if and when datasets were outdated. The effectiveness of the collaboration resulted in a long-term partnership between the two companies, validating Pollen8’s value proposition nurturing the spirit of innovation.