With increasingly liquid and competitive markets, companies need to introduce innovation processes into their daily lives. What can you do to inoculate innovation into your company’s DNA? How to improve innovation processes in the company? We will see it with some concrete proposals.
The latest INE study on company innovation in Spain raises business spending on innovation to 13,674 million euros. 28.5% of Spanish companies with more than 10 employees are innovative. The figure represents an increase of 5.5% compared to the previous period capacity building.
But no matter how good the data is, there is no longer any room for complacency or patting oneself on the back when it comes to innovation.
In a context marked by digital transformation and characterized by constant changes in a global market and agents competing to be the most disruptive, innovation has become a matter of survival . Innovate or disappear.
How to implement innovation processes in the company ?
The measures that I share with you below are intended to establish a culture of innovation in the company. Let’s look at some of them.
1. Select employees with innovative potential
As a measure to promote innovation processes, it is the responsibility of the Human Resources department to select the most creative and innovative people.
They will not always be the ones with the most titles, and they may not even be the ones with the most experience.
Innovative employees are those who take nothing for granted, question what is established and put passion into what they do.
2. Lead by example, this is essential to create innovation processes
An authentic leader is not the one highest in the hierarchy of the business organization chart. He is the one who guides others; an example to follow.
Encouraging creativity in bosses, directors and executives is essential so that the culture of innovation reaches every last employee.
3. Promotes innovation among staff
To create a corporate culture that contributes to developing innovation processes, there are 3 very important requirements:
l Employees should not be afraid to propose ideas.
l Managers, middle managers, etc., should not punish crazy ideas or ideas that contain basic errors.
l The worker must perceive that his ideas are valued.
Without these three requirements, it is difficult for staff to take the trouble to participate in innovation processes.
4. Create a channel for innovative ideas
You have to make it easy for employees to share ideas that they think could help improve the company. To achieve this, the best thing is to create a channel for ideas to flow.
The contributions of the workers could be presented publicly, put to a vote and select those with the most support so that they finally ascend to a commission to evaluate those ideas, or even to the boardroom.
The fact that employees themselves can vote on the ideas of their colleagues would allow the less successful ones to be discarded. But it would also be a good way to involve the worker in the entire process.
Internal social networks are an excellent technological tool to create channels through which ideas travel that could transform your company in the future.
5. Reward creative ideas and encourage innovation processes
There must be an incentive to involve employees in the innovation process. It can be money, days off or trips for the authors of the best selected ones. For it to work, the incentive must be given even if the idea is not ultimately carried out.
Both the prize and the idea selection criteria should be transparent.
6. Enable “spaces” for the exchange of ideas
There are several ways to achieve this. From enabling a (physical) space for employees to take breaks, to implementing communication tools between professionals, teams, departments, etc. Again, internal social networks play a key role.
Try to promote the free circulation of ideas. Like stagnant water, creativity is corrupted when closed groups or work teams are created.
It allows different teams to collaborate or give opinions on each other’s work and problems. Sometimes a change of perspective can yield a renewed vision.
The most pigeonholed employees are often the ones who have been doing things a certain way the longest; Creativity, however, sometimes benefits from inexperience in a field, because the staff is less contaminated by routine.
7. Implement mobility strategies in the company
Brilliant ideas don’t always take place in the workspace. Creativity often comes to us when we are relaxed, without pressure or stress. Archimedes discovered a method to calculate the volume of objects while he was taking a bath.