How to start innovation? How to build an 'Innovation Culture' in your organization?

In an organizational culture is a system of shared assumptions, values, and beliefs, which governs how people behave in organizations. These shared values have a strong influence on the people in the organization and dictate how they act, and perform their jobs. Organizations today have high focus on innovation & innovative offerings and it is imperative that organization adopts innovation as part of the organization culture.

                                  Innovation culture can be defined as the work environment that organizations cultivate in order to nurture unorthodox thinking and its application. Organizations that foster a culture of innovation subscribe to the belief that innovation is not the province of top leadership but can come from anyone in the organization.

                    Many organizations claim to that they support innovation. Plan are made on how to go about investing in INNOVATION & providing resources towards the innovation work. But when look at the program over months organization's support seems to be lacking in terms of fostering innovation. Their Reward & Recognition systems do not support innovation or they just stifle it. Usually the problem is that companies have review systems designed to ensure only Completed & Successful projects and programs are recognized. True to the service culture organizations only look at today’s results and not towards the future.

                                                          The CTO directive says  “go innovate,” but the organization usually supports taking 'Only Those Risks That Will Ensure Success' and that seems to defeat the Innovation Culture. GE would not be GE if they had no invested a huge amount of talented resources in research & promoting innovation but most organization defer from allocating the most experienced resources to innovation teams.

So what  needs to change? The answer is Possibility Thinking – starting with a clear definition of where you want Solve with your innovation and then spending time trying to figure out what is required to make it happen. Not focusing on the next single improvement, but rather the final picture first. This frees us from the constraints of the current system and processes and allows for a more open field of possible routes to get to a solution.

                                                                                  

                                      A 5 point approach for building Innovation Culture

1. Innovation Strategy:  Company's Innovation Strategy should be a combination of Top-Down & Bottom-Up collaboration of ideas. A lot of organizations want to innovate but the leadership team has no clear strategy around innovation. Instead, employees are given a broad and general remit to come up with great new ideas. This can lead companies to work on a number of unconnected products and services. In addition to this, innovation teams can find that some of the great ideas they come up with have no internal support from managers because they were never on anyone’s agenda to begin with. What companies need is a clear Innovation Vision that outlines the key trends impacting their business and how the company plans to use innovation to get ahead of those trends. This Innovation Vision should provide a simple guide of the types of innovative ideas the company will invest in. Innovation starts with the strategic decision to pursue specific types of ideas. Innovation tools can then be deployed as best practice to deliver on the chosen innovation strategy.

2. Innovation Funding: Corporate leaders can stifle innovation by how they make decisions to invest in ideas. Whether it is investment of money or resources, investment decisions making is perhaps the most powerful lever managers have in transforming a company's culture. If employees are required to write long business plans before they get any money, the company will end up rewarding the kinds of people who are happy to write such plans. Such practices tend to exclude the creatives and leave them out of the process. Furthermore, innovation succeeds through making several small bets and seeing what works. If the Business planning involves five-year projections, detailed delivery plans and an ask for a large amount of investment money then after a large investment is made, innovation teams are then managed by whether their project is on time and on budget. Such large investments based on detailed plans limit the number of bets a company can make. Since most innovative ideas fail, increasing the number of bets is a good method for discovering ideas that work. As such, what companies need is an investment process that allows managers to make Small Investments on a number of strategically aligned ideas, support employees as they test their ideas and then double-down investment on those ideas that demonstrate traction.

3. Collaboration: Innovation is a team sport. It requires excellent collaboration among siloed business and functional units, across geographies. Finding the best resources in your organization and combining them is a hallmark of successful innovation. To find the best solutions, you need to leverage the full range of expertise across your organization. This requires one to pull capabilities from across the company; this doesn’t happen when people are working separately instead of collaboratively. Another important aspect of innovation is involving the customers to create a breakthrough product.

4. Motivators -  Intrapreneurs are the employees who couple an entrepreneurial mind-set with the ability to leverage company assets such as expertise, channels, brand, market and customer base.to innovate.  To enable innovators to succeed, you’ll need to measure and recognize their innovative efforts. Three metrics play special roles. The first are leading indicators such as the percentage of employees and the size & strength of the internal collaborative ecosystem. The second type of metric measures the process. How many meaningful ideas are in your pipeline? Is your portfolio balanced and robust? Are you commercializing your ideas? Thirdly there are lagging indicators, the metrics focus on the revenues from new products, the impact on profit, and the effect of innovation on brand.

5.) Rewards & Recognition : You need to give public recognition to innovators. Bonuses are great, but they’re private — no one in the organization sees the check. However, when you promote someone based on their contribution to and collaboration on successful innovations, it sets a good example and motives coworkers. Public recognition displays management’s commitment to the people who demonstrate truly innovative behavior. All innovation efforts do not succeed  & in order to drive towards innovative thinking, failure has to be an option. Understanding that the lessons that you learn from failure leads to success is the key to any learning organization.Support of these failures is critical to their ultimate success. Leadership should recognize innovators instead of spending time looking for who was at fault and focus on the leanings from the failure and how to overcome it. How can you avoid it in the future and strive for better results? 

Finally, the hardest part of any innovation culture is to simply Pull Back & stop work on an innovation idea. When innovations are not panning out, not delivering the results expected, or driving to the capability you thought, you need to stop the work and simply move on. This is much harder for people and organizations to do as any innovation begins with a passionate individual or group that truly invests in the direction. While very difficult, it is a critical step in managing those critical resources you have directed towards innovation. An organization that has clear vision for innovation, a well thought innovation strategy and  road-map, encourages collaboration will succeed in building an innovation culture that realizes its innovation goals.