Ways to develop a Culture of Innovation

Many organisations strive for a competitive edge, an advantage over their competitors to help ensure their sustainability. Innovation is one such way, but for too long many organisations have concentrated on developing product and ignored the possibilities of innovation as a culture. Having an innovative friendly culture can harness the innovative and creative capacities of the entire workforce (and your customers and suppliers) to your advantage. But it is a difficult and for some a scary step.

Below are some of the activities that you may need to undertake on your journey to increasing the innovative capacity of your organisation

1. Great sources of new ideas are new starters to the company. Use them wisely and creatively
2. Always question longstanding beliefs
3. Ask questions about everything. After asking questions, ask different questions. After asking different questions, ask them in a different way
4. Avoid analysis paralysis
5. Change – change teams, project members and responsibilities
6. Communicate – open communication about anything and everything – make it easy to do
7. Communicate, communicate, communicate and communicate again. Ensure that every important message is repeated more than five times
8. Concentrate on the process of being effective at taking an idea from initial thought to application or market.
9. Embrace and celebrate failure. Success comes from volume not just quality
10. Encourage interaction between parts of the organisation that traditionally don’t communicate or usually collaborate together
11. Encourage people to meet informally, one-on-one, and in small groups, not just in functional teams
12. Ensure that everyone knows that reducing costs as a core strategy solves nothing. High costs are usually a sign of deeper or systematic problems
13. Have fun. If you’re not having fun (or at least enjoying the process) something is off
14. Imagine what you can make happen rather than dwelling on what might
15. Involve your customers as partners in the innovation process, while understanding that they are usually limited to wanting incremental innovations
16. Learn to see things differently
17. Learn to tolerate and enjoy ambiguity in data, and methods
18. Make decisions quickly at the lowest level possible
19. Make innovation the responsibility of all employees with appropriate objectives for each and every functional area
20. Make many new mistakes
21. Making innovation process rigid and core will stop spontaneous innovation efforts
22. No fixed rules or formula’s, only guiding principles
23. Notice change and innovation attempts and reward them
24. Provide time for your people to explore ideas and concepts through trust
25. Remove all organisational barriers which are stopping people communicating BHAG – Bold, Hairy Audacious Goals to senior management/ decision makers
26. Remove fear from the culture and management style
27. Reward collective, as well as individual successes, maintaining individual accountabilities, keeping innovation “heroes” visible
28. Seek a wide range of viewpoints. A diversity of views sparks more than conflict, it sparks innovation
29. Seek ways to learn from experience and find new and effective methods of sharing learning with your people
30. Use stories to support the transfer of learning
31. Spark interest – add images, photos and colour to your environment
32. Take a “go-slow now to go-fast later” approach, get many people involved at the beginning
33. Think of “self-organising” innovation, rather than “command and control” innovation
34. Think in the long term. Short term-ism has been proven not to work!

Using powerful organisational tools like the Creatrix can help to identify where the strengths of innovation lie in your organisation and provide a benchmarking took for measuring progress as you move towards being increasingly innovative – for innovation is a journey not a destination.

Byrd & Brown in their book provide a useful tool “the innovation Equation” where:

Innovation=creativity * risk-taking

In providing this equation the authors provide us – the change agents with a powerful methodology

**Article based upon an  by Mitch Ditkoff and Val Vadeboncoeurby