Most business leaders understand that in order to hone innovation in support of business transformation it is necessary to break down silos. For this, organizations should use integrated applications and systems that generate new insights, help identify opportunities for innovation and embed digital business processes and models to enable process optimization. But how can innovation become part of what employees believe they can contribute to ? How can they feel that it is part of their role in the organization to bring new ideas that can help the business grow ?
1. Adopt tools that allow folks inside your organization to share ideas and co-develop potential new uses of your products and services
These can be frameworks that allow anyone to know how to present their idea and proposal, to checklists to help them with their thinking process to assess its value or anything else that will simplify the process for the wider workforce. Clearly using new technology can help embed sharing and co-creation behaviors inside the company, but if people do not understand how to raise new ideas and whether these will be valued, they might refrain their creativity.
2. Ensure those ideas are continuously shared with the wider organization and evaluated collectively
To simplify this ongoing process, examples of types of innovation that will help the company’s purpose can be shared with the teams to support the refinement of ideas. In addition, developing a culture where intrapreneurs can continuously vet their ideas with customers and colleagues will help the acceleration of the innovation process.
3. Encourage everyone inside the company to innovate and make sure that barriers to innovation are eliminated
Some technology companies allow their employees to work up to 10 or 20% of their time on developing new ideas. This clearly allows innovation to flourish but also sets the mindset in which employees are allowed to evolve.
Is your organization’s goal to develop new business opportunities, new products or services for your customers ? How do you address innovation internally ? Have you adopted some of these practices ? Feel free to share in the comments section
Changing the way people do things is hard. But with enough planning and patience, you can transform your business, increasing revenue and quality of work life.
Do you consider yourself a leader or a boss?
We all know that change can be daunting
