Innovation has become such a huge buzzword these days, especially in business world. Wherever you turn your head, innovation is there.
It is now a given that to be competitive in the global marketplace, organisations need to be driving more innovation. However, some might not know that innovation goes beyond product and service development. In reality, innovation can manifest itself in multiple ways ranging from strategy and business processes to operations and management methods.
For example, it can include a technology change that alters the products and services you deliver, or a business model change that helps to better define the values you offer.
Yet, even the best technology or the most advanced tools cannot guarantee organisational success. Instead, to be able to completely reap the benefits of innovation, a company needs a clear focus on business strategy and goals to guide it in the direction it wants to go. This then creates the context for the role that innovation will play in delivering profitable growth. Moreover, it will help determine which type of innovation — incremental, breakthrough or radical innovation — that the organisation should be driving. It’s important to choose and be clear before you start because as we all know, you cannot get innovation for free.
The main point is that innovation only comes by invitation and dedication. Time, money and people need to be allocated in the search for the new products, services, methods or whatever elements make up your innovation programme.
For those who think that innovation costs too much, such a belief will hinder them from inviting innovation into their organisation — let alone implementing it. As a result they will lose in the business battle in the long run because innovation can lead to powerful cost savings, profitable new products and even a competitive edge.
It is not possible to predict when innovation will appear, or who will introduce it. You cannot just pencil a note into your datebook or assign specific people to have innovative breakthroughs. Instead, organisations first need to find ways to encourage innovation in all their people, and support them when they have new ideas. The best-kept secret of today’s top businesses is how they create an atmosphere that promotes and cultivates innovation. If you want to make your organisation like theirs, then where should you start?
My answer is that leaders or managers need to be the ones in charge of inviting innovation. They need to let go of their own fixation on authority and allow people to share ideas and try new things. They must be open-minded and value new knowledge as well as give serious consideration to the new and different. In other words, they need to encourage others to think creatively since there is a higher chance that people might have a creative breakthrough when they think creatively more often.
Another critical factor is that leaders must find valuable lessons from failed experiments. Although failure is discouraging, leaders who keep themselves and their people enthusiastic despite the failures can eventually produce more innovative suggestions over time.
Simply put, innovative behaviour must be modelled from the very top to the individual contributor. Senior leaders cannot just mandate the change — they need to be the role models.
Apart from leaders and managers, Human Resources practitioners can also play a vital role in promoting creativity in the workplace. For a start, HR can include creativity in the desired job description, and then utilise the selection tools that can assess a person’s creativity and ability to innovate.
Once you have those assets — in other words, those people with creative and innovative minds within the organisation — you must be prepared to offer compensation or rewards to those who willingly and diligently come up with new ideas. By doing so, HR can encourage people to put ideas to the test, and not be afraid of failures, when you assure them that the lessons learned from failures can be as valuable as those learned from successes.
In addition, HR must ensure that performance evaluations will award extra points to people who are keen to take on ambitious tasks, willing to try new things and not afraid of speaking their minds about new and innovative ideas, irrespective of whether the ideas turn out to be successful or not in practice.
After all, people are the driving forces and the building blocks for organisational success, so the organisation must properly value the ability of these people who can perform their tasks effectively while consistently conceiving of new ideas and refining them. Moreover, they must also able to implement those creative solutions and commercialise them until they become innovations that can maximise organisational competitiveness.
There are reasons why top companies such as Google, 3M and IBM value innovation so much. They are not hesitant to let their people freely raise ideas, take ownership of them and implement such ambitious notions, because they know it’s the road to innovation.
In the broader picture, a lot more companies today are now embracing and inviting innovation in the hope of gaining competitive advantage. My question is, are you ready to be one of them?
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Arinya Talerngsri is Group Managing Director at APMGroup, Thailand’s leading Organisational and People Development Consultancy. For more information, write an e-mail to arinya_t@apm.co.th or visit www.apm.co.th