According to an Accenture poll, leaders in the United States are increasingly embracing innovation as a tool to propel their businesses ahead, yet many of them have unrealistic targets and fail to achieve the desired results. According to the survey, in order to be productive, company owners must explore multiple methods to innovate, learn from their errors, and set fair goals. Just like Steve Jobs and technology speaker Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple and made it into the world’s most valuable company at over $2 trillion dollars of market value, most companies want to do the same.
While 63 per cent of firms hire chief innovation officers (CIOs) and more than 90 per cent use new technology to help the innovation process, many still struggle to build and nurture a truly creative culture throughout the organization. There are several ways your company may become more inventive and transform the way employees collaborate, whether by engaging your whole organization, learning how to celebrate failure, or seeking inspiration in other sectors as the Steve Wozniak speaker did for Apple.
Here are 12 measures every company may take to breathe new life into its ranks:
1. Foster an Innovative Culture
These days, innovation is such a buzzword. Openness to new ideas, failure, and learning from the process is what genuinely develops an inventive culture. According to Carol Dweck’s book Mindset, people might have a fixed mindset (closed, not receptive to change) or a development mindset. Allow your staff to thrive by instilling a growth mentality in them.
2. Commemorate Failure
To be creative, you must be inventive. Fear of being wrong suffocates creativity. Create situations in which failure and error are celebrated. One social media consultancy offers a “Church of Fail” where individuals can share how they failed and what they learnt from it. By praising errors and failure, you encourage individuals to be more creative and, as a result, more inventive.
3. Make the most of the people you already have on your team.
If your team has reached a point where creativity is no longer the norm, it may be time to change things up – not by recruiting a new person, but by repositioning those you already have. Give them a project that is outside of their typical work responsibilities. This drives them to abandon what they know in order to develop something new. Everything you require is frequently right in front of you.
4. Give Up On Products And Services
When a corporation defines itself in terms of its goods and services, it might stifle innovation. Consider your assets and strategic talents instead, and incorporate them into your core competencies. By describing yourself in terms of your assets, you give your workers the opportunity to use their abilities to deliver solutions rather than constraining them to a certain framework.
5. Go outside.
It’s easy to become stuck in a rut of doing things the same way they’ve always been done. Break the loop by going away from your work and your usual location. Have a wonderful summer! Have an outside-the-box brainstorming session. Hold a gathering in a park or open place to encourage free thought. Maintain productivity by conducting a group activity that results in concrete steps when you return to the workplace.
6. Take a look at other areas of the market.
Organizations commonly look to other organizations in their field for ideas or to imitate. Instead, look for inspiration and ideas in areas you’d least expect to find them. Perform due research on firms that are succeeding in other industries. Find out how they engage their staff in new ways, what new applications their consumers utilize, and what methods they use to produce efficiency.
7. Rehumanize Your Work
Creativity and vulnerability are the seeds of innovation. In order to be both creative and vulnerable, people must feel safe to fail. As a result, ensuring that all executives, including the CIO, maintain humanity at the forefront of their efforts. Create an inclusive growth environment, prioritize learning, and model behaviour that highlights the humanity of risk and failure.
8. Develop Employee Personas
Finding out more about what their particular needs are to release company-wide creativity is the first step in truly bringing out workers’ creative juices. Consider employee personas in the same way that buyer personas are used in marketing. Creating employee personas allows businesses to understand the specific demands of different employee segments in order to gain practical insights into what workers require to innovate.
9. Make an investment in knowledge management.
Often, the difficulty is not in having inventive individuals or ideas, but in recognizing such people and ideas. Many of the finest inventions rise from the bottom of companies to the top. As a result, fostering a culture of information sharing is the greatest way for firms to stimulate creativity and cooperation. Investing in a strong knowledge management infrastructure offers the processes required.
10. Solicit Feedback and Keep an Eye Out For Workarounds
Encourage employees to complain about processes and policies. Then solicit their advice. Examine the loopholes, shortcuts, and workarounds they currently use to avoid bureaucratic, constraining, and hindering processes. They are putting wonderful ideas into action, albeit illegally. Recognize their effort and consider how it may be adopted/adapted company-wide/team-wide.
11. Remove Everyone’s “Buts”
The simple semantic adjustment from “Yes, but” to “yes, and” generates an innovative culture! “Yes, and” promotes whimsy and rewards high levels of ideaphoria (rate of flow of ideas). “Yes, and” removes one-dimensional thinking. Make it an organizational game to reply to and praise all ideas, comments, and problem-solving talks with a forceful “yes, and” rather than a discouraging “yeah, but.”
12 Invest in Training and Rethink Incentives
Provide your current staff with the tools, technology, and time they need to collaborate and develop. Make a note of it. Invest in seminars and training for innovation. Don’t only talk about it and carry it like a slogan, and don’t designate one individual to wear the innovation culture hat all by themselves. Then back up that culture with corresponding KPIs, incentives, and bonuses. Do you need an amazing idea? Invest in your employees!