A Culture of Innovation
from Innovation Excellence.com 10 Aug 14 enhanced by Peter/CZO Wiz4biz
How can you “nurture” Innovation and motivate talents to bring innovations forward? Each company is destined to get the results from the consequences of it’s actions. Poor motivation, lack of solid & sustainable innovation culture, lead to poor results, and more than before, to an organization’s trouble or death.
Example: RIM, which brought the Blackberry to the world in 1999. At that time, BB was a revolutionary product. What happened is that the company lied on its laurels with its BB product, lacked of a clear strategy, about where it wanted to take the product. However, according to data compiled by management SW co Mindjet, the majority of businesses either don’t have effective innovation strategies or don’t effectively seek opportunities to innovate.
Smart business leaders shape the “culture” of their company to drive Innovation. Success & constant positive results come from the implementation and execution of strategies, business models, structure, processes, technologies & incentive systems that encourage innovation.
1. Define your company’s Mission around Innovation.
Many companies don’t have a mission statement, but for those which do, often times statements use generic terms, such as “best product in the world”, “best customer service”… They do not inspire employees to innovate. A strong & inspiring vision should be framed around how the company works to change its customer’s world, for the better. For example, Coca Cola’s mission is to “refresh the world, inspire moments of optimism & happiness, create value & make a difference”. You build an innovation capability by changing your culture, which may require a lot of hard work. And sometimes, you only see the results of this hard work over time.
2. Create the Structure to allow employees to “experiment” with New Ideas with “unstructured” time.
Successful innovative companies give time to their employees to get away from their daily tasks, to work on personal or company projects not directly related to their work. Then tap into this creative process.Google is well known in the tech community for its “20% time,” which gives employees a day a week to follow their passions, but it’s hardly the first company to have done so. For decades, 3M Corp. has allotted 15% of its employees’ time to innovation, which led to the creation of the now-ubiquitous Sticky Note, among other products. When innovation gets postponed for too long, companies languish — witness the reversal of RIM’s fortune & MicroSoft’s criticism in the mainstream media for its failure to innovate.
“Innovation programs – such as Idea Management – remove the “constraints” that accompany traditional work, and offer a safe space for failure. Idea Management is the way to see innovation and is much more effective than seeing it as just commercialization. In the commercialization view, the only way to win is to have a great idea, protect the IP from it, & bring it to market. In the Idea Management view, you win by identifying & executing great ideas. They don’t have to be new products; the ideas can be for new ways of doing things, or for new business models. Those are all ideas. Your organization needs to manage ideas – not to just create new products, but find better ways of providing them & make the user’s experience better. Reward employees with time to think, while providing them with the structure they need to do it.
[ 3. Recognizing Contribution, 4. Return to your Roots, 5. Pay more attention to Culture, than trends, 6. Continuous Education, 7. Allow failure, in Premium Content ]