How do you promote innovation in your organization?

Question

Innovation seems to be a Buzz word these days. Each organization is giving a lot of emphasis on it and at the same time it is also becoming the most abusive word. Every new thing is not an innovation. In my organization also there is a drive started to promote the innovation culture and some how i got involved in that.

I want to know how do you promote an Innovative culture. Are there some verified ways which drive people to think in that way. I am looking for an answer that tells me how I can motivate people and give them some direction so that they stretch their imagination and come up with new ideas.

Answer 1

You need to be very careful in doing this activity. It is tough to inspire people to think differently. It becomes impossible if you are trying to inspire people who are senior developers. One way to do is - lead by example. Find a problem which is known to everyone in your domain or field. If you can solve that problem differently, then speak about it in forums. See whether people are getting excited about it ? Thats the only way you can generate the spark in people. Though I failed even then. There was a good idea in my mind and I shared with folks and asked them to come up with solutions. But people did not spend time on it and finally I had to solve the problem and guide them to implement it.

Answer 2

Innovation in an existing organisation will nearly always challenge the status quo. Unless you're incredibly lucky you'll need a senior person to get you through the political mine field that causes. Assuming you have that, your champion, a good approach to innovation is a reasonable incentive, how about Ipod/Cash Prize, to enter write up a single idea on 1 side of paper, you can enter as many times as you want.

Also ask all your new hires for ideas, they're invaluable because they don't know what can't be done, they haven't been coloured by your culture.

Answer 3

Innovation is not something that can be promoted, because promotion in essence is about selling the idea that "innovation" is good and worthwhile. Whilst majority of your staff might agree on the point it won't make things change.

What you need to do is to build an environment conductive to innovation. Remove barriers and obstacles that don't let employees innovate now. Promotion is often about rewarding some desirable behaviour, but you don't need to reward innovation because it is a reward in itself.

I've witnessed one time too many a situation when management says "Ok, guys, now start giving us all your great and innovative ideas and, we'll have a competition of some kind and the originator of the best idea will get a bonus." This is so wrong on so many levels:

• Innovation is a process and idea is just an end result. It’s wrong to reduce the process and environment just to the end result. As you can't bribe your kid into becoming a word famous singer by simply promising her a car. You need to create an environment supportive of her becoming a singer first and then she might or might not become a star.

• Ideas are cheap; putting ideas into life is hard. Pure thought experiments won’t lead to innovation, one need to put resource, time and money into real experimenting.

• Some of the best ideas couldn’t be evaluated not until a long time after they were invented and implemented.

• Innovation is not an area where you really want your staff to compete, quite the contrary — collaborate.

Answer 4

You need to make it easy for everyone in your organization to reach you and to communicate within the origination. You need to be able to have ways for people to front ideas, discuss ideas without needing to go through supervisors ect.

Regular polls, contests and awards for fronting for example the months best idea will help the staff to brainstorm here and there.

For your employees to be innovative I think they need good forms for communication, and be able to post suggestions to the org. anonymously.

Every month or so you should have a dedicated set of a couple of people to go through every idea and screen them. If you promote prizes and awards for the best ideas I think you will promote an innovative culture in your organization.

I also think its a very good idea to actually spend some resources into this. Innovation is extremely important and the better ideas should be given a explanation if they cannot be realized at this time in your org. Many of the ideas that will be presented to you will most likely be good, but not properly thought through and many will fail to see the big picture, which is why its a good idea to explain why this will be very hard and resource demanding to put through.

Edit: Be sure you dont dismiss all ideas upfront just because they are costly in resources to put through. If you decide that an idea might be good, but might be costly, that idea could be worth to look more into. Ultimately you want your business to be ready for the future, and be able to expand and grow. This wont happen in the long run if you dont have innovation and are able to put to life some of the ideas.

Answer 5

If I have a company, I would create an internal forum where my employees can post their ideas and their colleagues can give their constructive criticism there.

I'd also give my employees time (i.e. Google's 20%) to work on ideas they are passionate about.

Answer 6

I'm full of imagination, new ideas and passion for programming. Unfortunately, noone wants that of me where I work. People just have a piece of software, they further develop and maintain it, avoiding any initiative.

Which is worse, when you can't make you people be innovative or when a company does not want/need their people be innovative?