How to nurture a culture of innovation in your company

[#1]

Great team leaders are constantly looking for approaches to promote creative thinking within their staff. Encouraging continuous innovative ideas to improve the flow across your company is essential for the work environment. Organizations should embrace valuable visionary strategies in their daily framework to shape a better structure and find practical methods to satisfy their customers' needs. Building innovation requires your team's engagement with the brainstorming process to generate a suitable concept to complete any project in the best way possible.  

What optimization techniques will help your team unleash its creative assets to build a culture of innovation within your company?  

1.  Empowering your employees to share their different views and cutting-edge ideas is essential to generate value. In addition, conducting creative workshops and supporting your team to think out of the box will help build diverse methods to produce better results. Finally, giving your employees autonomy and rewarding them during work will motivate them to get things done and boost their productivity. 

2. Establish a clear plan around the objectives that your team needs to accomplish by promoting continuous communication. Sharing insights and feedback is an effective way of responding to obstacles and finding innovative solutions to reach your goals. 

3. Managers shouldn't be afraid to pursue the "test and learn" approach to obtain an overview of their product's strengths and weaknesses. Running experiments regularly and trying new practices whenever required will positively impact the project's development. Therefore, learning from previous mistakes and applying them in future strategies is extremely helpful in making smart decisions. 

4. Provide your team with the essential resources and metrics to execute their role correctly while staying up to date with the company's constant workflow. Incorporating the right management tools will make it easier for the team to brainstorm and share pioneering techniques, keep track of tasks and activities during a sprint, and allocate data analysis.   

Maintaining a culture of innovation within your organization requires plenty of effort, time, and money, but it is necessary to create a growth mindset. It will not only be helpful for the company's benefits, but it will also result in the development of skills and abilities for every individual contributing to the business. 

[Jimi Wikman]

I think it is important to lift innovation above just the team level, and also make sure the right people take the lead on innovation.

I see many development teams trying to adopt innovation for end users, which is far from their area of expertise, and it is often very wasteful. Some great ideas surely spring from developers, but their profession is to build great software, not to formulate hypothesis on usability or CRO. That falls in the domain of UX and CRO professionals.

I also don't like the idea of empowering teams while providing autonomy because that form silos and snow globing attitudes that harm collaboration with other teams. You should have the authority to speak on behalf of what your role is, and you should absolutely foster a culture of daring to speak up and throw ideas out, or ask questions for that matter. You should also understand your place in the organization and focus on collaboration and not just your team's need. Autonomy can never exist as you will always depend on other groups, especially enterprise roles, finance and marketing.

Test and learn is what ideation is for. This is where the UX and CRO teams test their hypothesis with users tests, A/B tests and so on. Never should you risk business loss by trying out things in production, unless the product is new and not business critical.

Right tools and especially time for deep thinking combined with a culture of embracing the stupid and absurd will boost creativity a lot. Putting the right people in the driving seat will make sure those ideas will be tested and verified properly before being put into production.

[Summer.Hogan]

Great article @Andreas Springer _Actonic_ and great suggestions! My company is really good at building a culture of innovation. We have innovation contests (with cash prizes) every quarter and they work hard to implement as many of the innovative ideas from the employees as possible. We also have an innovation hub where we can enter ideas whenever we want and then they vet them and send them to the correct teams to implement. Establishing and building a culture of innovation is very important. I never realized how important it was until I came to AAA Insurance.