What is bottom-up innovation?

Bottom-up innovation is a concept that promotes the fact that ideas can come from anywhere within the organization and subsequently encourages all employees to partake in the innovation process. For example, companies like Atlassian allow employees 24 hours to work on anything they want while Toyota encourages employees to submit an average of 100 idea suggestions annually. 

Bottom-up innovation stands in direct contrast to the top-down innovation strategies that have been present across industries for generations. In the latter instance, innovations are made by a small number of decision-makers. However, even the most knowledgeable C-suite execs cannot know every possible process or project within the organization. Bottom-up innovation disperses the innovation process across the entire team while also overcoming bureaucratic behaviors.

Advantages and disadvantages of bottom-up vs top-down innovation

No single right or wrong answer exists for how a business should innovate. However, research does show that a company-wide approach to innovation will statistically yield more ideas. This instantly gives bottom-up innovation a significant advantage. 

However, it is important to take a closer look at both bottom-up and top-down innovation to determine where your priorities should lie for effective innovation management.

Bottom-up innovation pros and cons

Aside from making innovation accessible to all, bottom-up innovation has the advantage of letting employees work on their ideas while also tapping into the collective knowledge of colleagues and external contributors. This creates a winning environment that revolves around “failing, killing ideas early, and trying often enough”.

However, bottom-up innovation can take time to implement as you must cultivate a culture where employees nurture a creative mindset. Furthermore, intrapreneurs must learn to complete the validation process on limited resources.

Top-down innovation pros and cons

Top-down innovation does offer some advantages. It creates a fast process while the limited number of ideas means you can put more resources into each one. A focus on longer-term development also supports moonshot projects.

However, top-down innovation misses out on ideas from other people. Worse still, it creates an anti-meritocratic environment because senior decision-makers won’t see their ideas scrutinized. Meanwhile, the correlation between burnout and reduced innovation is scientifically shown as well as anecdotally supported. Sadly, top-down innovation can quickly lead innovators to give up on creativity.

How to combine bottom-up and top-down innovation

While bottom-up innovation has supported countless companies like Swisscom, the truth is that top-down innovation will be needed at a later stage. Ultimately, then, bottom-up innovation should be used to produce ideas while top-down should be used to take the best ones to fruition. 

In other words, you should focus on a simple three-step process;

• Encourage employees across the team to generate ideas through bottom-up innovation.
• Use a defined validation and testing process to ensure focus on the most promising ideas.
• Use top-down innovation so that the remaining ideas have a genuine chance of reaching the market. 
  
  

How is KICKBOX by rready bottom-up?

rready's flagship product, KICKBOX, is a an innovation management and idea execution program that promotes bottom-up innovation by actively encouraging participation from all employees. Moreover, the clear frameworks ensure that the best ideas are decided by merit rather than who presented them. When combined with the guidance of the templates and gamification elements, it is the ultimate toolkit for unearthing the best ideas from across your entire team.