What is The Bottom-up Method in Innovation?

What is Bottom-up Innovation?

Bottom-up innovation supports idea generation 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 years. In the latter instance, innovations usually originate from a small number of decision-makers. Bottom-up innovation enables every member of the organization, regardless of their position in the hierarchy, to prioritize innovation, while also overcoming bureaucratic barriers.

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 over a traditional top-down approach. 

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 an environment that facilitates “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 continuously nurture a creative mindset. Furthermore, innovators must learn to complete the idea validation process on limited resources.

Top-down Innovation Pros and Cons

Top-down innovation does offer some advantages. In general, it creates a much faster process, while the limited number of ideas means you can put more resources into every idea that surfaces. A focus on longer-term development also supports larger-scale, moonshot projects.

However, top-down innovation misses out on ideas from the wider group of employees. Worse still, it creates an anti-meritocratic environment because senior decision-makers won’t see their ideas scrutinized. 

How to Combine Bottom-up and Top-down Innovation Methods

While bottom-up innovation has been the key to success for many companies, the truth is that top-down innovation is often needed at a later stage. Ultimately, then, bottom-up innovation should be used to produce ideas while top-down methods 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 Intrapreneurship, is a an innovation management and idea execution program that promotes bottom-up innovation by actively encouraging participation from all employees. Through clear frameworks and a guided process, it ensures that the best ideas are decided by merit rather than who presented them. When combined with a variety of innovation templates and gamification elements, it is the ultimate toolkit for unearthing the best ideas from across your entire team.