Where does the buck start?

In a recent column, technology and practice management thought leader Gary Boomer makes the critical point that, for accounting firms to succeed at innovation, someone needs to be responsible for it. Whether it’s a partner or a chief innovation officer or even a small committee, firms need to put a face to innovation, to hold someone accountable for building and reinforcing a culture that encourages and supports creativity, that leverages fresh ideas and fresh ways of doing things, and that routinely develops new solutions through a systematized pipeline. To make sure all that happens, someone needs to be in charge of it on a regular basis. The buck, as they say, needs to stop somewhere.

But where does the buck start?

The simplest answer is: anywhere and everywhere. While ultimate responsibility for innovation in a firm must reside with a single person or very small group, innovation itself can come from multiple sources — from partners and entry-level staff, from clients and customers, from software vendors and joint venture partners, from everyone and anyone who can have an idea. In fact, one of the key responsibilities of a chief innovator is to make sure that everyone in the firm and within its sphere of influence feels empowered to innovate, to make suggestions, to dream up new services, new solutions, new methodologies and new processes. Imagination is no respecter of rank or propriety; good ideas can well up anywhere. (Our cover storyon technology and audit quality offers a great example: an associate at the most junior level built a data workflow and visualization for their own personal use that’s now saving countless hours for staff all across a Big Four firm ­— see page 6.)

Innovation can start with anyone; it can also start anywhere. Great ideas for improving a practice area can certainly come from the staff in those departments, but they can also come from their clients, or from admin staff who handle the billing for those services, or from the banker or lawyer who referred those clients to the firm. Good and interesting ideas pop up in all sorts of places — if you’re looking for and encouraging them.

Just as important as all that is the fact that innovation can come in a multitude of forms, and is definitely not limited to technology. To be sure, many innovative ideas can be substantially enabled by hardware and software, but that’s about elaboration, not origination, and it’s a mistake to expect that only the tech-savvy will be coming up with million-dollar ideas.

As with most everything else, innovation was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Dozens of firms created new solutions for figuring out when clients could safely reopen their offices, or built Paycheck Protection Program calculators, or otherwise dreamed up unusual ways to keep their clients afloat. Necessity was the mother of invention there, but necessity won’t necessarily disappear when the pandemic is over — just the perception of pressure. Clients will still need radical new solutions to changing environments, firms will still need to build them, and they will still need to encourage their development wherever they may spring up.

Innovation may be just a few people’s responsibility — but it should be part of everyone’s job.