BUS604: Innovation and Sustainability

Offering employees challenges, freedom, resources, encouragement, and support can help them to innovate.

Learning Objective

• Outline how to encourage creativity, participation and innovation through effective management

Key Points

• People perform best when they are driven by inspiration and are encouraged to push their boundaries and think outside the box.
• Teamwork enhances people's strengths and lessens their individual weaknesses.
• One of the most powerful tools for promoting employee creativity and innovation is recognition.
• Ultimately, in developing a culture of innovation you want employees to feel comfortable experimenting and offering suggestions without fear of criticism or punishment for mistakes.
  

Terms

• creativity
  The quality or ability to create or invent something.
• innovation
  A change in customs; something new and contrary to established customs, manners, or rites.

Strategies capable of producing innovation require resources and energy; it is therefore necessary to discuss in your business plan the organizational structures and practices you will put in place to encourage and support innovation. Amabile points to six general categories of effective management practices that create a learning culture within an organization:

1. Providing employees with a challenge
2. Providing freedom to innovate
3. Providing the resources needed to create new ideas/products
4. Providing diversity of perspectives and backgrounds within groups
5. Providing supervisor encouragement
6. Providing organizational support

Innovation Cartoon shows the challenge of translating innovation (designers) to economic success.

Create a Culture of Innovation

You will likely find that you need to generate hundreds of ideas to find ten good ones that will create value for your organization. This is part of the creative brainstorming process, and it should be encouraged. It should be the responsibility of every individual in the organization to come up with ideas, not just the founder or key staff. Here are some suggestions to encourage the flow of ideas.

Encourage Creativity

Encouraging creativity helps keep staff happy. If they think something is important and has the potential to create a financial payoff for the company, let them follow their idea. People perform best when they are driven by inspiration and encouraged to push their boundaries and think outside the box. But employees cannot do this when they are being micromanaged. Employees need to feel independent enough to own their innovative thinking and to pursue the ideas they are passionate about. In fact, if management effectively fosters a creative and open environment, innovation will happen naturally.

Encourage Participation

Teamwork enhances people's strengths and mitigates their individual weaknesses. Effective teamwork also promotes the awareness that it is in everyone's best interests to keep the business growing and improving. Creating a participation-based environment means creating smart teams, encouraging open dialogue, and minimizing authority. Criticism is productive and should be encouraged, but it must be used constructively.

Provide Recognition and Rewards

One of the most powerful tools for promoting employee creativity and innovation is recognition. People want to be recognized and rewarded for their ideas and initiatives, and it is a practice that can have tremendous payoff for the organization. Sometimes the recognition required may be as simple as mentioning a person's effort in a newsletter. If a staff member comes up with a really creative idea, mention them in the company newsletter or on the news board even if their idea can't be implemented immediately. Make it clear that compensation and promotions are tied to innovative thinking.

Enable Employee Innovation

You may have an innovative culture in your organization, but you also need to familiarize staff with some of the hallmarks of continuing innovation. For example, you could educate employees at regular training sessions on topics such as creativity, entrepreneurship, and teamwork. Each session might conclude with the assignment of an exercise to be performed over the next few working weeks that will consolidate lessons learned. Your aim here is to give employees a taste of innovation so they will embrace the process.

Other Motivators

• Profit-sharing and bonuses
• Days off
• Extra vacation time
  

Encourage employees to take advantage of coffee breaks, lunch breaks, and taxi rides. Often great ideas that can lead to innovation will happen outside the places where we expect them to happen. If it's hard to get staff together for common informal breaks, consider taking them out for an informal meal where you can encourage creative discussion about work. Also be sure to encourage laughter at meetings because laughter is an effective measure of how comfortable people feel about expressing themselves.

Source: Boundless
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