1. Our Story…
Coming from different backgrounds and working in three different areas of the Steel plant, we, team
DNA, came across the topic for this year’s CTYM – “Harnessing an innovative culture in the
organization, issues and challenges for SAIL”. Three minds, riddled with questions about why things are
done in one way and not the other and bubbling with ideas of possibilities, we took this theme as a very
exciting opportunity to find answers and express our ideas about what could be done.
We began our journey with an effort to understand innovation by reading books and various research
works related to the topic. In order to relate those concepts with our existing organizational culture we
talked to our senior officers and took a preview of what we have as our culture. Based on those
discussions we undertook a survey at RSP which revealed a few startling facts and figures, described in
the report.
The innovative culture was found to be the result of these four factors-
• Employees competence
• People’s willingness to contribute
• Organization’s pro-innovation policies
• Implementation effectiveness
We found that the things that impede the flow of ideas and prevent us from innovating effectively are
many levels of hierarchy, bureaucracy and weak departmental bonding. We found that we have the seeds
of ideas which we have to capture and germinate them into a garden of innovation.
For this we introduce INNOou where we suggest solutions to enhance our innovativeness and tackle our
challenges. This includes the following steps
Step 1: Convince your family about the garden
Target: Imbibe the need of Innovation into the company’s culture through top management such that
hierarchy acts a facilitator and not an inhibitor.
Step 2: Boost the soil fertility
Target: Enriching the knowledge base to make employees competent and up-to-date in their field of
expertise
Step 3: POP (germinate) the seeds
Target: Generate and capture productive ideas.
Step 4: Fence the garden
Target: Protect seeds of ideas from bureaucracy, hierarchy and workload
Step 5: Nurture the saplings, Harvest and Celebrate the Yield
Target: Implement the ideas and reward the employees, to further motivate them according to their
motivation levels.
To meet these targets, we propose various tools under the scheme of INNOou, some of which require
formalizing of the existing best practices and others like the concept of Idea Officer, I.D.E.A. (Innovation
Driven Excellence in Action) - an online idea capturing software designed by us and The Power of 2 - an
impetus to motivate employees by bringing a sense of belongingness, are the new horizons to be explored
by SAIL to sail into the next orbit with innovation.