Many executives want their companies to be more innovative. A new assessment tool can help pinpoint your company’s innovation strengths and weaknesses.
Everyone wants an innovative corporate culture, but how do you develop one?
This article posits that the ability of a culture to support innovation depends on six key building blocks: values, behaviors, climate, resources, processes and success.
Values drive priorities and decisions, which are reflected in how a company spends its time and money. Behaviors involve how people act in the cause of innovation. Climate is the tenor of workplace life. An innovative climate cultivates enthusiasm, challenges people to take risks within a safe environment, fosters learning and encourages independent thinking. Resources are comprised of three main factors: people, systems and projects. Of these, people — especially “innovation champions” — are the most critical, because they have a powerful impact on the company’s values and climate. Processes are the routes innovations follow as they are developed. Finally, the internal and external success of an innovation drives many actions and decisions that may have an impact on the next one: who will be rewarded, which people will be hired and which projects will get the green light.
The article also includes a 54-element test developed to enable managers to assess a company’s “Innovation Quotient.” Over the past three years, more than 1,000 employees in 15 companies around the world have taken this assessment. A case study in the article outlines the experience of a Latin American company with the assessment tool.
2 Comments On: How Innovative Is Your Company’s Culture?
Thanks for a valuable article, it reminds me of two points made in The Truth About Innovation (2008). First, innovation is a cultural thing with values, behaviours, climate interacting with slack resources to make new ideas useful (the definition of innovation). Second, that innovation can be measured and that some kind of balanced score card for innovation is a valuable part of the efforts to greater innovation success. One of my more recent books (Adaptability, 2012) argues that it is how innovation helps organisations to successfully adapt that matters most – and this would be a worthy addition to your cultural scale.
During my corporate days, i was one of those who promulgated the truth that Soft one is the hardest one. Even now I strongly support the thought.
Innovation essentially should come from within the organisation and the people who are actively lifting the company to higher platforms. Look around the global scene now. The world is growing really fast ( there is also another thought process parallel to it saying that the world is shrinking fast !) . That is the challenge to the CEO and his team. The sunshine is there, but then how to bring it inside. He need to see the genesis of the innovative spririt taking root in his organisation and how it adds value to the company, its product and the people involved.
Good article
J.K.M.Nair