If there is one thing policing and the private sector have in common, it’s the need to innovate. For-profit organizations are driven to innovate to increase their bottom line. Profit is king. Policing, on the other hand, generally seeks to innovate when there is a demonstrable public safety, political or community urgency to do so. Additionally, in those agencies with an innovative influence within their cultures, innovation is driven by the realization that the social milieu in which policing exists today is constantly changing. These agencies focus on innovation and continual improvement to maintain their effectiveness at controlling crime and enhancing public trust and confidence. In the future, these needs will become increasingly more acute.

Nearly every police leader understands the need to innovate within their organizations. Many are intentional about innovation and skillful in its execution. But mostly, police leaders who have a desire to innovate have not received formal training on how to do this or are just not clear on how to do it. They struggle to bolt it to the culture of their organizations.

Innovation happens in two basic ways: it happens organically in a more happenstance way, or it’s an intentional organizational practice with guidelines for engaging in innovation, methods for capturing the lessons learned from the innovation efforts and strategies for expanding organizational knowledge focused on constant improvement. Police leaders can support both these innovation channels in a variety of ways. The most basic is to simply encourage their people to try new approaches and accept failure as a part of the innovation process. The more formal method is to acquire a working knowledge of innovation as an intentional organizational strategy and then set into place innovation programs that “make real” the process of organizational innovation and improvement.

In our article Innovation Exchanges: advancing meaningful improvements in Future Policing, we describe one fairly simple approach to innovation that builds on existing inter-agency relationships. It’s one of the most easy-to-implement, inexpensive innovation concepts in policing.

In our Future Policing Tools section of our Resources page, we have posted a department-wide memo used by one agency to capture the regional innovations and best practices of surrounding agencies through their innovation exchange. After the agency visitations, the “better ideas” gleaned from the visits were examined for adoption by the agency leadership. From its first agency visitation, a traffic supervisor brought back a cost recovery idea that has generated over $1 million since his half-day visit. That’s a pretty good return on investment by anyone’s estimation!

The memo, and its attendant Post-visit Debrief Form, are in Word format so any interested agency can download them and modify them for their own use. Click here to read and download the Innovation Exchange memo.