How can innovation be nurtured

Consider establishing an inventor incentive program to encourage employees to submit new and useful ideas. The pros outweigh the cons. Host company-wide contests to encourage broader participation. Just make sure to celebrate the winners with prizes, executive recognition, or even the freedom to use company resources to pursue the idea.

They need respectful feedback and an encouraging environment in which to pitch ideas, test them, fail and learn. Provide innovation tools. Employees need tools in order to explore their ideas further. Examples include easy and fast access to research and prior art, testing or brainstorm frameworks, customer information and survey data, a network to share and iterate on ideas, and a well organized internal IP database.

Establish training in innovation methods so they can keep getting better, and help others as well. For a start, goals must be defined short and long-term , leaders must be assigned, measures provided, and of course budgets must be made available. New innovation strategies should be well advertised inside the organization, and the best way is by promoting success stories realized ideas. Anyone in the organization should know about the idea submission process, as well as the rewards that are provided.

He or she must also be able to see the status of an idea that is submitted. In the past, ideas were collected using the suggestion box, but today ideas are collected through efficient webbased tools which support not only the idea gathering process but also the participation of individuals in the entire innovation process. One of the most important factors in fueling creativity in an organization is trust.

Environment influences creativity which is the zero starting point of the innovation process, with the individual as the starting point of every idea. It can be said that innovation links directly to creativity, but creativity is only the start of the long journey that an idea must go through to become a product. We may or may not have not creativity in our work, but innovation will only come as part of a defined process.

People are naturally creative, but companies often are not and are usually more likely to suppress creativity. Individuals who have the ability to create will not be able to express innovation in those organizations that do not encourage creativity. The key to success is in the creation of models that describe the innovation process, and allow for the occurrence of failure — which is very common in projects. Indeed, the story of innovation is a story of failure, because only a fraction of ideas are ever realized.

And you must be willing to make necessary, healthy stumbles. Great ideas cannot come to life without feedback from others. A desire for ongoing feedback means never accepting the status quo and constantly innovating instead. Andrew's favourite Workstars value is: We listen to customers, not accountants. On the hunt for some awesome employee wellbeing ideas? We already know that employee wellbeing…. Full Name.