Supplier Diversity and Corporate Innovation

Supplier diversity is not a project or a program, but rather the way organisations are beginning to conduct business.

For example the Metropolitan Police Authority in conjunction with Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) aims to encourage a diverse range of suppliers to help stimulate a varied and competitive market place.

This includes understanding the supplier's perspective and marketing the MPS to suppliers.

The MPS also needs a diverse and competitive supply base to help improve value for money and to develop suppliers to meet new or emerging requirements.

The MPS has significant buying power and by working with suppliers, they can encourage suppliers to gear their business planning accordingly.

The MPS aims to promote the economic, social and environmental well being of the communities it serves. Provided that there is compliance with EU public procurement regulations and Best Value, the MPS can work with suppliers to realise 'community benefits' of this kind through their procurement activities.

ICFBA Partners believe in providing equal opportunity to all supply partners. We strive to facilitate non-discriminatory business opportunities for small and diversity-owned businesses.

Continuously re-evaluating our supply partner base provides access to reliable resources and ultimately creates jobs, innovation and leads to business success.

The toughest thing to do in organisations, is to tell the truth without getting into trouble. You know that you must innovate or die, but how do you give people credible permission to talk intelligently and honestly about innovation without having to excise them from the body of the business as political saboteurs? And everyone is so busy running trying to stand still, that they haven't got the time to think about the alternatives, discuss or even give them a name. So now's the time to consider licensing a different kind of conversation that doesn't initiate defensive behaviours around the status quo. An iCafe or Innovation Café is a structured conversation using fast, creative techniques to unlock thinking and define the innovation opportunity without triggering NIH (not-invented here) behaviours.

Victor Newman and David Gurteen designed Innovation Cafes (iCafes) to facilitate rapid, documentable and dynamic conversations that encourage new practitioner behaviours to drive innovation within individuals and organizations. iCafes are designed to be delivered at the organisation's preferred location, as a weekly sequence of between 4-8, 2-4 hour facilitated sessions.

Innovation Cafes begin by asking questions to identify what doesn't work now and turning it into usable knowledge for an immediate future. iCafes do very little teaching, and try not to preach. They are designed to set people free to articulate the latent, emergent knowledge that you only get when you ask people the right question about the right issue at the right time. iCafes are designed to deliver those a-ha moments that happen when you hear yourself or others say something profound or useful and wish you had written it down. And we do.

A classic moment from a recent iCafe included a leader of a major global R&D organization musing: "you know, I only ever get to think like this on my own, late at night". This was a pretty disturbing thought when you consider how much investment was betting on his ability to lead a strategic conversation from within his tired old thinking "box". Another, the heartfelt thanks received from an organization that particularly liked the way they got to invent their own innovation strategy for themselves without having to work through the traditional NIH behaviours triggered by a stranger’s consulting methodology. If you get to invent it, you are more likely to do it.