How to create a culture of innovation

When asked what his leadership style was, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos replied that he constantly surrounded himself with people he had to hold back rather push forward. He created teams of people who had a rich mix of potential and proven ability to table new ideas and translate them into products or services to take to market, or simply create tools to help make people’s lives a whole lot easier and simpler.

It worked, and Amazon has since exploded to become one of the world’s most valuable businesses. Bezos and Amazon are not unique. Apple, Spotify, Netflix, and Tesla have all become synonymous with innovation. What they all have in common is the recognition that to stay relevant to their customers they must always be thinking of ways to add value in new, improved, and meaningful ways.

So, how can leaders in other areas of business create a workplace culture that can give them an edge over their competition and tap into the wealth of ideas that lie in waiting throughout the whole organisation? It is a lot easier than you might imagine.

Here are some ideas as to how this can be achieved:

Be clear

It is a cliché but also true, if you want to encourage ideas and participation you must define the problems that are worth solving. They need to be tangible, too. For example, saying you want the business to reduce its impact on the environment is all well and good, but what does this mean in practice? Instead, state the business’s goal is to reduce its emissions by 30% in the next 12 months. That then prompts people to consider ways in which this can be achieved.

Be collaborative

Research by Davis & Eisenhardt found that when two or more tech companies joined forces to overcome a challenge facing their industry, it led to greater innovation. In fact, it resulted in 18 new patents compared to just two among those companies who opted to tackle the problem independently. The same outcomes apply to when internal teams are given the opportunity to collaborate with each other instead of operating in silos.

Be empowering

In a study undertaken by Gallup, organisations whose people feel empowered were found to outperform those that don’t by 21%. If you want your people to generate new ideas, create the mechanisms needed to enable them. This might include giving employees time off to research and develop their concepts before they bring them to the table. Google and 3i are great examples of this, they give their people half a day each month to do just that.

Be invested

If you want to encourage experimentation of ideas, stock the laboratory with all the instruments needed to discover the winning formula. The cost at which you sell your products or services reflects their quality; similarly, the amount of investment you make in bringing new ideas to life will be key in determining how much of an edge you really do gain over your competition. And don’t forget to reward and recognise innovative behaviour in your teams, even if the final product never gets to see the light of day.

Be obsessive

Obsessing too much about budgets and deadlines simply kills all good ideas dead before they ever get off the ground. That’s because the focus is all wrong. Innovative businesses obsess about the customer and how they meet their pain points and challenges they are facing right now head on, and those that could emerge in the future.

An article by McKinsey said that “No culture can be innovative without great people, and the demands on innovators have never been greater.” They are right. Time was that all great ideas were generated by a select few within the organisation, and nobody else would ever get a look in. Today, however, innovation can come from anywhere.

But while embedding some of the steps outlined above will go a long way to establishing an innovative culture, it is important to hire individuals who not only have a diverse range of skill they are equally prepared to put themselves out a bit – to get involved in multiple projects simultaneously. As McKinsey eloquently put it, “Call them ambidextrous; call them system thinkers.”