An intranet to capture and nurture new ideas

By VICKI JAYNE

Not too many workplaces encourage employees to dream. At Food Solutions Group, it is fundamental.

The company has even adopted as its symbol the North American dreamcatcher. Samples of the finely structured webs, traditionally fashioned to capture positive dreams and exclude negative ones, dangle over office desks.

You may think that a bit esoteric for what is essentially a commodities-based industry. But the fibre links of old lore are underpinned by the electronic links of today's world wide web.

The company is about to launch an intranet system built on its own knowledge base and designed to capture and nurture new ideas.

"It has a unique process in that it not only generates ideas but solves them within the group," says chief executive Paul Marra.

Anyone can lodge an idea, which then appears as an icon to which other employees within the group must respond and, if they can, contribute. The ideas that have legs will be picked up for development.

While it has a user-friendly front end, this electronic dreamcatcher has the grunt of a large corporate knowledge base behind it.

Food Solutions, part of the Kiwi Group, incorporates five companies: Kiwitech (the research engine), Maverik (a new global dairy flavour business), Natural Health Zone (focused on natural dietary supplements), Cottee Dairy Products (a trailblazer for dairy sports supplements) and Kiwi Milk Products (the mother ship).

All are chock-full of creative, intelligent folk and the intranet is one tool the group uses to harness their contributions.

The whole process is designed to institutionalise the innovation seen as vital to Food Solutions' future.

"This group was primarily set up as a growth engine around the creation of ideas, technologies and knowledge that could be leveraged into business opportunities both within New Zealand and globally," says Mr Marra.

A large part of his role as leader is finding ways to not only make these intangibles work for the company, but to measure how they work.

"One thing we're working on for next year is an intangibles balance sheet - one that measures our value in terms of the knowledge we have within the business as we move forward."

The elements of that balance sheet will be incorporated in the intranet as a kind of dashboard indicator of the company's knowledge-based performance. Quarterly reports will help to chart progress.

So far, Food Solutions is running ahead of its visionary schedule. Performance targets include growth many times higher than the 10-15 per cent to which most companies aspire.

"We're aiming to launch an innovative new business every 12 months, and so far we've been successful," says Mr Marra.

Since its start-up 15 months ago, the group has established Maverik, launched a dietary supplement in the United States, and taken a stake in an Israeli firm that uses Food Solutions' know-how to make and market whey-based food additives.

That expertise is "part of the intangible value we want to build and be able to demonstrate in other opportunities around the world," says Mr Marra.

A shared global vision is one of the platforms on which Food Solutions bases its success.

"Probably 50 per cent of our activity is offshore, though not yet our earnings, so it's vital our people understand we are a global knowledge business."

Four other success factors seen as vital are the ability to exploit intangibles, a shared culture (including values, beliefs and assumptions), teams (high-capacity and fast-paced), and knowledge-based successes (represented as "the way we mine uncertainty to extract, support and share knowledge"). Central to all is good communication.

In its literature, the company talks a lot about imagination, courage and passion. The last two tend to be linked, says Mr Marra.

"If you have people with a lot of passion for what they do, they also have courage to get out and act on it. And we encourage that."

Both are traits the company uses as part of its employment criteria and builds into its culture through leadership training that Kiwi Group as a whole has adopted, working with the Centre for Vision and Leadership in Palmerston North.

The centre distinguishes between short-term incremental innovation and long-term radical innovation. The first involves improving what you do, the latter means revolutionary technologies and business models.

"While there is a lot of talk about innovation, most practice fails to deliver on the more radical end of the spectrum," says centre spokesman Dr Peter Blyde.

Leading what he describes as the long game is "faster, messier and more far-reaching."

Mr Marra wants to build genetic vigour into the corporate culture and develop in staff an instinct to quickly spot opportunities.

"We make no apologies for doing things at speed," he says. "We see it as being critical in many areas because the time from concept to market is getting shorter.

"That is part of our intangible knowledge base that we can move fast."

Though still in its infancy, the company is doing just that. But before action comes imagination.

"In this company, we work on the principle that it is mandatory to dream."

* vjayne@iconz.co.nz