Digitisation has lowered entry barriers and increased competition. In such a cut-throat environment, enterprises rely on innovation to offer differentiated products.

But success in innovation is not guaranteed, even when enterprises invest money in innovation projects. Innovation thrives only when the enterprise culture supports it.

Promote Creativity

Innovation cannot exist without creativity. A culture of innovation values new ideas and perspectives. It requires a mindset of continuous learning to seek out new ideas and perspectives. Such creative thinking encourages adaptability. This enterprise becomes agile and resilient to thrive in changing environments.

Industry leaders promoting creative thinking among their workforce:

• Establish transparent systems for information sharing, to establish trust, community, and openness.
• Promote brainstorming sessions. They encourage employees to share and discuss ideas without fear of judgment or retribution. Even if such ideas challenge the norm or are unconventional. Treat disagreements and normal.
• Share success stories and case studies to inspire others and to highlight the positive impact of innovation.
• Host innovation challenges such as hackathons from time-to-time. Such events stimulate creative approaches to problem-solving.

Allow Risk-taking and Experimentation

When employees follow the established rules and procedures, work takes place smoothly. But external dynamics change and existing systems soon become irrelevant or insufficient. In such a situation, the enterprise falters. Pre-empting such a situation requires exploring new things when the going is good, or when there is no pressing need for the same.

A strong innovation culture encourages employees to think outside the box, and beyond their assigned roles.  Industry leaders support and reward employees for experimentation and taking risks. They encourage experimentation and risk-taking by:

• Considering failures as part of a learning opportunity. Enterprises with a successful track record in innovation have robust frameworks for risk-taking. These frameworks empower employees to take calculated risks.  and define acceptable levels of failure. Enterprises penalise employees for failures kills any chances of innovation. 
• Empowering employees to undertake tasks their way. Obliging them to follow the established procedure kills innovation.
• Rewarding and celebrating initiatives. For instance, if a new way of doing things reduces costs or speeds up things, the company rewards and celebrates such initiatives.

One success story of an enterprise thriving by promoting risk-taking is Pixar. Pixar’s work environment nudges people to take risks, be candid, and celebrate experiments. The company’s psychological safety net makes employees feel comfortable with the uncomfortable.

Encourage Continuous Learning

Sustained innovation depends on continuous learning. A culture of innovation requires opportunities for the workforce to learn while at work. The specific interventions that can promote continuous learning include:

• Crafting training courses, to develop or upgrade skill sets.
• Offering employees opportunities to attend conferences and workshops.
• Instituting mentorship programs, or pairing experienced employees with new employees, for knowledge sharing.
• Creating knowledge-sharing platforms, for employees to share knowledge and expertise with others.
• Post-mortem failed projects to document lessons for future initiatives.

The success of these initiatives depends on a regular feedback and improvement loop. These interventions require a lot of experimentation, and also trial-and-errors.

Empower the Workforce

The hallmark of an innovation culture is giving employees the freedom and resources to generate and pursue new ideas. Facilitating the same, however, requires structural interventions.

Bureaucracy often resists change and reinforces the status quo. This makes it difficult for new and innovative ideas to gain traction. If nothing else, it creates long lag times, which result in missed opportunities. A lengthy approval process makes the idea irrelevant by the time the approval comes.

Allowing innovators to bypass barriers and hierarchies that sap creativity, to seize opportunities. The challenge before industry leaders is to reconcile such initiative with reckless maverickism. Successful leaders:

• Implement a flat hierarchy. Flatter hierarchies reduce layers of management to create a more agile and responsive company.
• Streamline approval processes. Leaders ensure the safeguards posed by rules and regulations remain even when they take the procedural guardrails off.
• Encourage systems thinking. Many enterprises fall into the trap of siloed thinking. They focus on their narrow, departmental goals and objectives, oblivious to the big picture. Leaders encourage the rank-and-file to think of the big picture.

Promote Collaboration

Encouraging collaboration across departments and teams boosts diverse perspectives and expertise. Specific interventions to such ends include:

• Setting up communication platforms for employees to access information and discuss ideas. For instance, many enterprises put away strategy documents in siloed documents on a private network drive. Rather, use wiki-style software for anyone to discover, read, and comment on such documents.
• Encouraging internal talent mobility through job rotation. Job rotation offers employees opportunities to work in different roles and departments. Also, set up cross-functional teams for the same purpose.
• Cultivating relationships with venture capitalists, incubation labs, universities, venture capitalists, and other entities.  These external agencies can support and promote innovation.

Lead from the Front

Leadership make or break an innovation culture. The onus is on leaders to champion innovation and participate in innovation initiatives.

Leaders also need to:

• Set clear expectations and extract accountability from creative people. Innovation success depends on leaders channelling creativity into key focus areas. Leaders have to facilitate the creative workforce. But they also have to make them accountable for delivering practical and affordable outputs. 
• Provide support for the end-to-end innovation chain, from manufacturing to marketing and distribution. Many innovators may excel at generating ideas but cannot do everything themselves. Leaders need to help individuals see where their work fits in the knowledge ecosystem and offer support for the other areas in the value chain.
• Engage with each team member. Identify and acknowledge their potential. Motivate them to try new things that align with their competencies. When everyone gets a say and an opportunity, it sparks novel ideas. Also, such interventions offer psychological safety that encourages employees to take bold risks.
• Overcome resistance to change. Many employees remain comfortable with the status quo. Change is often intimidating. The onus is on leaders to identify the underlying reasons for the resistance and work on overcoming such resistance. For instance, some employees remain unsure of how to integrate new ideas into the company ethos. Others cannot be bothered to take the extra effort and embrace uncertainty. The role of a leader is to nudge and push employees to overcome such mental blocks or physical pain points.

Provide the Right Tools and Support

A culture of innovation remains a non-starter without an adequate budget.

Employees need tools and resources to pursue new ideas. They need the freedom of time and access to technology to get things moving. If they have to spend the bulk of their time on clerical tasks or paperwork, they won’t have the time or energy for creativity. For instance, AI-powered automation frees the workforce for higher-level creative tasks.Successful leaders make available the right tools. Platforms such as OutSystems enable enterprises to get the best out of their assets and indulge in unhindered innovation. OutSystem’s low code platform makes it easy for the workforce to generate instant solutions. They do not have to rely on specialist help or waste time. They can code powerful solutions to leverage the power of innovation easily.