In the digital era, the speed of connection and the ability to innovate are critical for organisational success. However, as I wrote in my last article, many people mistakenly perceive innovation in terms of a product and service alone, when in reality innovation can manifest itself in several ways: through technology, a business model, strategy or management and operational process.
To continue on last week’s theme about welcoming innovation into your organisation, this week I will look at how a diverse workforce can contribute to innovation.
Fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace has become a priority for many organisations in the business world today. But many people question exactly how diversity can drive innovation.
To answer, let’s first take a look at the foundation process for building innovation within an organisation. The first and probably the most important step is to set your objective by asking yourself, what is your end goal? What kind of innovation do you want to see? Then you need to open your eyes and your ears — to listen and to see new information, new insights and new data from various sources without any prejudice — in order to obtain new ideas.
Next is the idea generation process. During this stage, it is vital to categorise the acquired ideas into groups and prioritise them according to feasibility in responding to the target you have set. This way you can avoid unwanted waste of time, budget and human resources.
Then, it is time to test and run a pilot project based on the chosen ideas to make sure that they will actually work when they are launched to the market.
As you can see, it is obvious that for innovation to materialise, the variety and amount of insights and ideas an organisation can generate during the first stage is critical. That is way many companies that wish to succeed in innovation value diversity in terms of voice, culture, thinking, style, skills, education, and social perspectives.
To illustrate this, in a Forbes Insights report published a few years ago called “Global Diversity and Inclusion: Fostering Innovation Through a Diverse Workforce”, asserted that 85% of survey respondents agreed that a diverse and inclusive workforce helped bring the different perspectives a company needed to drive innovation. Ninety-seven percent of the companies surveyed even had formal diversity and inclusion strategies in place and deemed it a competitive advantage that helps draw new clients while increasing the potential to add consumers in emerging markets.
Given all these reasons, I’d say that by maintaining a workforce of employees with varied perspectives, backgrounds and cultures, you stand a better chance of seeing innovative ideas, products and processes coming to life, simply because these people bring their own culture and transformations to the workplace with different aspirations, values and ways of getting things done.
Moreover, as more than half of the world’s population today is under the age of 25, and Gen Y (those who were born between 1982 and 2004) has already become the largest age demographic in the global workforce, I am certain that the speed of innovation manifesting itself is about to increase.
Why? This is because Gen Y people are also known as digital natives. They have grown up with a world of information at their fingertips and they are eager to learn. For them, learning is a continuous, lifelong and endless journey. Some experts even say that many Gen Y see experiential training as a high-value benefit, and some seek work experience more for the learning value than the compensation.
Most importantly, when the speed of connection allows them to be closely connected with their peers through social media, Gen Y tend to value the “wisdom of the crowd” — collective information that they can trust from the peers they can relate to.
This factor alone proves that Gen Y will definitely gain an advantage over other generations in the workplace in bringing out new and highly innovative products, services or even working methods, since access to information is the first stepping stone in the innovation process.
But if you need more evidence, let’s take Burger King’s new CEO, Daniel Schwartz. He’s a 32-year-old Gen Y who transformed the company within his first 13 months on the job.
Undoubtedly, innovation will become the key differentiator in the business war at the global level. Thus, having a diverse and inclusive workforce that can drive innovation is certainly an ultimate goal for many organisations. Now that Gen Y is starting to take over the global workforce, let’s look forward to a fresh perspective on age-old business problems and the possibility of groundbreaking results in the near future.
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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