Building A Culture of Innovation

Booz Allen has been delivering innovative solutions to clients for over a century, but in 2013, the firm embarked on a mission to effuse an intentional Culture of Innovation throughout the organization.

“The spirit of entrepreneurism and innovation has been at our core since the beginning. And as we looked ahead to the next 100 years, we had an opportunity to freshly infuse innovation in how we approach the market and solve client problems,” says Senior Associate Chris Holmes, one of the Culture of Innovation initiative leaders. “The greatest pool of innovators are our employees—who understand their clients’ missions better than anyone. Employees’ diversity of thought, experience, and expertise are the key to driving innovation. We thoughtfully built a framework to bring this creative diversity together, which provides a new lens to analyze problems. Our culture of innovation empowers employees as creative thinkers and provides unparalleled value for our clients and for any problem we try to tackle.”

For the past 3 years, Booz Allen’s Strategic Innovation Group (SIG) has built and driven this Culture of Innovation framework. We connect people and ideas across the natural barriers of markets, capabilities, and geographic distances. Through focused challenges, and the creation of planned points of collaboration, we’ve established an environment that attracts more of the best ideas and compels our people to connect, contribute, and thrive. Recruiting and retaining a new generation of talent is a priority to stimulate creativity and create original, sustainable value.

To foster this culture, Booz Allen developed a set of tools and programs—several of which have generated impressive buy-in and engagement. These include:

• The Garage: An online crowd-sourcing platform where employees post ideas and problems, get feedback, and pose/respond to “challenges.” Since launching in 2014, the Garage has crowdsourced nearly 2,500 ideas, and 44,000 votes have been cast by employees to posted challenges.
• The Combustion Chamber: A live, "Shark Tank"-like event, where employees get 5 minutes to pitch near-market-ready ideas to a panel of senior partners—with no decks, just their pitch and whatever makes it stand out. In 2015, $285,000 was awarded to winning pitches to develop, launch, and scale new client solutions.
• Annual Ideas Festival: A celebration of our innovation efforts that also allows us give back to our community. The day’s events—which take place simultaneously in several Booz Allen offices—bring together junior employees and senior leaders for sharing, networking, and workshops where attendees brainstorm solutions to issues faced by a local not-for-profit. In 2015, employees all across the firm could also engage with the day’s events via a custom app that connected users through photos, comments, and real-time feedback. More than 87,000 interactions and impressions were generated.
• The Millennial Project: We’re attracting the sharpest young talent through this effort that includes a winter engagement program to expose junior technical talent to consulting earlier in their career-seeking process; a 10-week competitive Summer Games internship; a Student Incubator to source, capture, and prototype brilliant new ideas; and a means to invest in the STEM talent pipeline by working on social good endeavors.

We’ve come a long way since 2013 and the next chapter of our innovation journey is underway as we jump into the Innovation Hub (iHub) network, a group of entrepreneurs, startups, incubators, investors, and other leading-edge firms in pre-existing hot beds of innovation in places like Austin, Boston, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Seattle. Our iHub presence is helping the firm enhance our brand, recruit and retain top talent, generate leads, sell new business models, and pilot new technologies. We’ve even opened our own Innovation Center in Washington, DC. From its innovative space design to the cutting-edge technologies from our partnering sponsors—Intel, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Microsoft—the state-of-the-art Center is built to fuel creativity.

“The Innovation Center and our engagement in the larger Innovation Hub network are helping to raise the bar,” says Senior Associate and Innovation Center Director Kurt Scherer. “Now our clients are getting not only the best of Booz Allen, but of our partners and alliances as well.”