How to Encourage Innovation in Business

Change the culture & operating practises, keep the core and values

The company itself is the ultimate creation. A company that achieves an optimal stream of great products and services stems from it being an outstanding organisation, not from the outstanding product. One cannot continue to create products that live up to the ideals of innovation if we do not create an organisation capable of creating them.

We need change, experimentation and constant improvement. We should not just preach these values, but institute concrete organisational mechanisms to stimulate change and improvement. One thing I would like to see in more companies out there is a deliberate commitment to create a strong culture of innovation and entrepreneurialism. Moreover, those need to be supplanted with well- functioning mechanisms to encourage this activity.

Mechanisms to encourage innovation (inspired by 3M):

1. ‘Own business opportunities’ People who successfully champion a new product then get the opportunity to work on that project or even run it as his or her own project.
   Purpose: To stimulate internal entrepreneurship


2. ‘Dual ladder’ career track that allows technical and professional people to move up without sacrificing their research or professional interests. Why is it that companies pride themselves in recruiting the best talent out there (design, engineering, programming, etc.) only to promote them into managerial positions where they have little or no use of those skills they were recruited them for in the first place? 
   Purpose: To stimulate innovation by allowing top professional and technical people to ‘advance’ without having to switch to a management track.


3. ‘New Product Forums’ where all divisions share their latest products and demonstrate them. We usually do demonstrations for consumer services to bring them up to speed about our new products. Why not do the same for the different project teams?
   Purpose: to stimulate new ideas across divisions


4. Technical forums To stimulate cross-fertilisation of ideas, technology and innovation.
   Purpose: Technical things are invariably the pursuit of a selected few experts in the organisation, but more should be done to create collective thinking on this.


5. 15% rule – spend 15% of your time on projects of your own choosing and initiative
   Purpose: To stimulate unplanned experimentation and variation that might turn into successful innovations.


6. Golden step award – granted to those responsible for successful new business ventures.
   Purpose: Stimulate internal entrepreneurship and risk taking.


7. Innovation attitude: Give people the room they need – allow people to be persistent.
   Purpose: Evolution means both variation and selection and the more s the better the evolution

Mistakes will be made by giving people freedom and encouragement to act autonomously, but the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it is dictatorial and undertakes to tell those under its authority exactly how they must do their job. Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative and it’s essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow.

• Listen to anyone with an original idea, no matter how absurd it may sound at first
• Encourage, don’t nit pick. Let people run with an idea.
• Hire good people and leave them alone.
• If you put fences around people, you get sheep. Give people the room they need.
• Encourage experimental doodling
• We need basic guideposts, not rigid rules

Further Reading:

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