Driving Innovation

As a leader, I’m often asked how to drive innovation for our company. While I try personally to be as innovative as I can, the real force for innovation comes from harnessing the creativity of our entire team. To do that takes little more than to encourage and allow — get out of the way, give people space to come up with new ideas, and reward risk takers by championing their efforts.

Innovation means change. It implies something new is happening. That can be a new experience, a new product, a new technology or a new way to experience something our company has always had to offer.

“Fail fast” is a mantra now heard frequently around our building. It’s OK to try something different and even to fail. In fact, it is almost as important to learn how to abandon ideas as to try new ones.

Perhaps most importantly, innovation has to engage and excite people — and that includes our employees and our guests.

How can you drive change in your company? Here are my top five innovation drivers:

1. Create the right atmosphere. In the past, many of us assumed that innovation was always the byproduct of teamwork and collaboration, but recently I read that some of the best ideas also come from solitary, quiet thinkers. So we need to provide a work environment where both activities can happen.
   
   
2. Listen to your all of your employees. Some of the best ideas might be from your front-line employees, not the C-suite. When I visit our hotels across the globe, I focus on listening to the employees I meet. They might have the next big idea that sets our hotels apart from the competition. Our decision to launch AC Hotels in the U.S. was teed up by our internal developers who, in turn, had been listening to our real estate partners.
   
   
3. Listen to your customers. In my business, that’s easy. Almost everyone I meet, whether at a school event or a night out with my wife, has stayed in a hotel and they love to share their stories — both good and bad. I love to hear them. From conversations like these, we decided to roll out The Ritz-Carlton Rewards as a partner program to Marriott Rewards.
   
   
4. Find innovative partners. For example, we asked students at the Rhode Island School of Design to take a fresh look at the desks in our guest rooms. They came up with some wild ideas that we never would have dreamed up. Sometimes an innovative idea comes knocking at your door, and you have to know it when you see it. We had been looking for a way to enter the budget lifestyle market when we partnered with InterIkea to build a sustainable, economically efficient hotel building with a sexy design. That’s how MOXY Hotels were born.
   
   
5. Don't give up. Right after we launched EDITION, our luxury lifestyle brand, the economic downturn hit. It stalled our plans somewhat, but we never gave up. We opened our second EDITION hotel in London last week with boutique hotel innovator Ian Schrager.

Without innovation we won’t meet the challenges that our competition and global growth present.

At Marriott headquarters we have The Underground, an Innovation Lab where we can play around with new concepts and ideas. Check out the video from the lab and let me know how we’re doing.

Photo: Marriott International
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