A culture of innovation and nurturing creativity at workplaces can have some tremendous positive implications on an organisations operations and employees. Culture of innovations at a workplace helps evolve employees mindset and enables them to think out of the box, and all of this can go a long way in supporting an organisations business as well as growth priorities.
According to a Boston Consulting Group (BCG) report (2014) on the role of innovation, about seventy five percent of organizations that responded to a study ranked innovation as one of their company’s top three priorities, and of those 22 percent said it was their top priority.
A culture of innovation can be about creating a work environment that supports and nurtures unorthodox thinking and its application. To formulate such culture a company should be committed to supporting and motivating employees to look beyond obvious, to experiment and to identify new ways of doing things. There has to be well thought through boundaries however, so as the structured workflow is not hampered because of new ideas and experiments happening every day in all departments.
How innovation & creativity at workplace can help ?
At a workplace that encourages innovation, employees can develop and ideate on effective business processes, new products, new technology and services.
Effective and easy workflows & business processes: Most of the workflows and routine work processes, including those at large businesses, small as well as agile businesses are built around assumptions related to productivity, and theoretical constructs valid at a certain point of time. With time an organisation grows and evolves, while most of these workflows continues to stay in place, and don’t change with times and technology. The end users, drivers of the workflows are the employees and teams that participate in the process and they are the best people to come up with inputs on improvement – ideas on possibility of the process being reviewed, redrafted etc. A culture that allows employees to participate will of course benefit from the reworked processes. These processes could be related to effective mechanism for customer acquisition, service delivery, for ensuring customer delight, or engaging teams etc. Almost all functions will have various processes that can benefit if employees are allowed to think and come up with ideas – small or big, as a part of some structured initiative.
New products, new services, new technology: Every business is about new products, new services, and new technology. While most businesses have dedicated product teams – responsible for product innovation, new technology etc., however there are various aspects to developing a product, working out a go to market plan etc. And people who may not really be a part of product team can also come up with ideas that can help the product guys think better, bring in a customer or market perspective , as well as support perspective to be able to think, plan and deliver a more relevant product.
The essence of innovation is about allowing an organisation to think – to take small steps, to nurture thinking – small and big at all levels. Apart from the fact that all of this can help an organisation – it also allows employees at all levels to be a part of the growth and transformation process.
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