Many corporate companies understand that innovation is crucial for a company’s success. Hence, you will find that most corporate issue policies promote innovation. Not to mention, innovation is one of the decisive factors for a company’s growth. Without an innovative approach, a company cannot secure new heights and implement new techniques to its business processes.
In an ever-evolving world, innovative companies are the ones that survive. In the digital market, a company that cannot incorporate digital innovation is sure to fail. Nevertheless, innovation does not only focus on digitalization but also on creative methods of increasing productivity.
A company with an innovation culture values creative and new techniques to its business propositions. In a way, innovation culture encourages incremental innovation and supports idea generation. To integrate innovative thinking in your company, you must take steps to develop an innovation culture.
Embrace failures and learn
Innovation does not come in an instant. Implementation of innovative ideas requires taking a risk. Therefore, you must embrace failure and understand that it is an inevitable part of a business. Failure is an important aspect of a business. It not only teaches you how to deal with setbacks but also provides you with the opportunity to learn and grow.
Daniel Ndukwu, founder of GrowthBoost and UsefulPDF has this to say on the importance of learning from mistakes and taking calculated risks – “Failure isn’t something to be vilified. Rather, it’s a natural part of improving. Healthy work cultures allow people to make mistakes but instead of putting them down, there’s a constructive conversation around what went wrong and how people can improve in the future. This kind of environment allows people to take reasonable risks and, eventually, you’ll reap the rewards as an organization because more ideas will flow and people will be confident enough to present ideas that are outside the box.”
Once your company learns to deal with failure the right way, then the innovation culture is likely to flourish. Most companies cripple under failure after implementing a new idea. This leads them to never trying anything new, which stunts their growth significantly.
The best way to deal with failure is to analyze it with a rational mindset and learn from your mistakes. Ultimately, failure helps you figure out where you went wrong and what you need to do to improve. Thus, innovation is incomplete without failure; the best ideas are the ones seasoned, tried, and tested.
Incentivize new ideas
By putting incentives on ideas, you can predominantly motivate the workers to be more creative and innovative. Incentivizing change and creativity will help adopt the innovation culture. Consequently, incentives on idea generation will be your manifestation of the innovation culture within your company.
Varun Ashok, director of Mobile Experts, Australia’s largest mobile repair chain has this to say on improving the retail experience of his shops “We’re always looking to change up the way our customers interact with our shops. An example is how we are bridging the gap between the online and offline experience and allowing our customers to shop online, get a quote and make a booking before they step foot into our shop.”
So, give your company workers the room for experimentation, and accept all kinds of ideas, even the ones that break conventional boundaries. Innovation will give birth to evolution, and evolution is now becoming a prerequisite for a company operating in the 21st century. A company needs to respond quickly to the rapidly changing customer demands to stand firm and beat the toughest competitors. Being indifferent to the customer demand is equal to letting your competitors take the lead ahead of you.
Have an open channel for communication
Another thing that is even more pivotal for the implementation of the innovation culture is communication. Innovation does not necessarily stem from giving people motives and rewards to be creative. Instead, an innovative idea takes influence from two or more ideas, brings them together, and overcomes their shortcomings.
Thus, generating new ideas involves a session where everyone comes together and pitches their innovation. Steve Jobs said, “Innovation comes from saying no to 1000 things,” and having an open channel for communication makes this quite evident. Formulating an innovative strategy that works will only come after rejecting other strategies and improving them with a better idea.
Overall, the importance of collective effort is vital for a company, especially if you want to develop an innovation culture. For this, you need the collective and courageous effort of your workers. You must have an open channel where you encourage ideas to flow out of multiple brains to maximize your success at a truly inspiring and thought-out idea.
Encourage all departments to innovate and improve
If you want to embrace the innovation culture in your company, it should have implications that are beyond idea generation. You need to motivate the workers in all departments of your company. Give them the autonomy to make innovative changes to the business procedures and put incentives on the outcomes.
Elon Musk, founder, CEO, CTO, and chief designer of SpaceX; early investor, CEO and product architect of Tesla, founder of The Boring Company has this to say on the need for innovation – “The problem is that at a lot of big companies, the process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.”
When you give them some autonomy, it allows them to take ownership of the work, which consequently results in better outcomes. Therefore, make sure that you do the innovation culture justice by integrating it into all the company’s departments.
Learn from the past
Be fully aware of the steps you took in the past. Embrace the decisions that worked, and get rid of the ones that did not. A successful innovative company learns from past failures and is not afraid to revamp its model to counter the previous mistakes.
Coming up with new ideas may even be easier than letting go of old ones. Thus, you must let go of the past and move on to newer business models if you wish for your company to grow.
You can apply many techniques to tune in to the ideals of an innovation culture in your company. It doesn’t even have to include spending large sums of money. Even taking the smallest steps can help your company adopt the innovation culture.
