An interesting piece about Boeing’s Workplace Innovation Lab in Management Innovation Exchange. Boeing started a 90 day program that connected Gen Y employees to their managers for business innovation. The aim was to accelerate business priorities, leverage personal networks, facilitate conversations, and spread the use of new technologies. The idea of ‘reverse mentoring’ is something that strikes me as an interesting way of bridging not only a generation gap, but also a knowledge gap. This gap is mainly about the new technologies that businesses are facing.

The aim of the Workplace Innovation Labs were:

• Performance improvement through more collaborative working
• More effective ways to transfer expertise across the generations
• More productive use of investment in collaboration tools
• Helping leaders to be people-leaders as well as technical-leaders

Some of the lessons learned:

• that communication tools should be varied according to the importance and urgency of the communication;
• that a less seasoned employee can bring fresh perspective and valuable insight to a long standing business problem;
• that having a manager open to innovative solutions and using young talent in innovative ways can be a powerful retention lever.

What I like about programs like this one is that they contribute to organizational learning and create social capital within the organization. That is why a program like this one should not be limited to a one-shot 90 days, but can work as a continuous tool for workplace innovation.

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