In business, there is one thing you need to keep in mind—you are dealing with people, creatures of emotion… not logic. Whether you are dealing with your staff or customers, you always need to keep this in mind and make sure that you are communicating in a manner that takes emotion into account.
One of the ways that your company can benefit from emotional innovation is by creating and fostering a culture of innovation within. By far, one of the biggest organizational challenges is to figure out how to promote, manage, and benefit from innovation, however. Many business operators believe that it comes with luck and while it may in some situations, it mostly comes through the proper and purposeful management of internal processes.
Creating a culture of innovation within is by far the best way to promote innovation as it facilitates an innovative workspace.
5 Ways to Create a Culture of Innovation
There are lots of ways you can do this. In this blog post, we have identified five key areas that are, in our opinion, essential to create a culture of innovation.
1. Make it everybody’s job
Most employees naturally do not think of themselves as innovators. After all, how many times have you heard of situations within corporate environments where middle management have discouraged their teams from demonstrating initiative and coming up with new ways of doing routine tasks? The sticking to of procedures by these middle management employees is one of the main reasons that innovation is stifled within a corporate environment.
However, by making it front-and-center by making it everybody’s job (e.g. by involving everybody in your innovative processes), you encourage your employees to think outside the box, come up with innovative solutions, and benefit your company in the long-term.
2. Make people capable of learning
Innovation doesn’t just happen by accident, it doesn’t matter how much you promote it. Learning processes are critical for it to happen and there are lots of things that must happen before your company can embark on its new journey of chasing it.
Although we said innovation should be everybody’s job, to make it everybody’s job you need to ensure that you have the right work environment, engagement, and learning culture. If you do not have a strong learning culture, your employees will struggle or refuse to be innovative.
3. Collaborate with one another
Technology by itself isn’t enough to help your company along through the stages of its innovative transformation. The key to true success with this is collaboration and the open mindset to discover new and unexplored ways of working and thinking. This increases levels of participation and overall motivation within your teams by pulling people together and providing stale ground for experimentation, fostering innovation, and building a consensus with one another.
Collaboration isn’t just an internal matter, though—the most successful organizations build collaborative relationships with their customers, resellers, partners, and anybody else who has a stake in the business.
4. Establish strong networks
For many companies, building strong networks means moving employees across different departments, functions, countries, and businesses. While this approach does help to develop careers and shows that the company is investing heavily into employee growth, it is not a scalable approach that bodes well in the long-term.
Instead of sending off employees to far away lands and calling it “career growth”, companies should explore collaborative technologies that can help them build better, stronger, and more beneficial networks that allow employees to work in ways that are more productive, less costly, and less disruptive to their personal lives.
5. Set goals and measure your progress
As with any major project—establishing a culture of innovation being a major one—it is important to set goals and measure progress against these goals as the company trundles along through the usual day-to-day.
After you have established your culture of innovation and it is in full swing, think about the intended results, the various stages at which innovation happens, and the signs that innovation has had an effect and use these to measure results. For example, how many ideas have been created? How many were good or commercially viable? How many were implemented?
