Dive Brief:
- CEOs and research consistently report that innovation is the most important ingredient for company growth. And any manager worth his or her salt will tell you that a culture of innovation is only possible when it’s promoted and encouraged from within, according to a blog post at Incentive Inc.
- A culture that’s “off” and doesn’t foster good collaboration and idea sharing is the main inhibiting factor to innovation, says author Rickard Hansson, CEO and founder at Incentive.
- Hansson asks "what’s a company desiring to promote a culture of innovation in the workplace to do?"
Dive Insight:
Hansson offers four critical ways in which to build a culture of innovation: Be receptive, encourage collaboration, be transparent and create chances for unstructered time.
For example, being receptive means not using defined departments to confine knowledge into siloes. If you do that, employees have a smaller and less inspiring view of your business and might not have the information necessary to contribute truly great ideas that can rock the boat – in a good way.
He also points our that several other companies are now reaping the benefits of offering their employees free time to work on personal projects. Hannsson writes that being social at work has not been a sought-after behavior in traditional cultures, but but :enterprise social collaboration" has employers seeing things differently. He says the benefits it can bring to the workplace can not only foster innovation, but also increase productivity and make employees feel more satisfied at work.