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How to Get Your Company to Buy into Innovation

New ideas won’t flow at companies where workers are disengaged. And today, there are a lot of disengaged employees. A recent study by McKinsey found that 87% of workers globally are disengaged at work. This means the innovation manager’s job is harder than ever.

They need to find ways to encourage innovation across the business. Doing so creates a culture where employees contribute ideas enthusiastically and management have confidence in the innovation process.

The more a company innovates, the more engaged its people are. The more engaged people are, the more they innovate.

In this blog, we ask why innovation can get stifled at enterprises. We’ll then show how innovation managers can win the support of managers and colleagues and encourage innovation across their organization.

Culture Beats Strategy

Innovation often suffers as companies grow. That’s because managers assume that the tools and processes that allowed them to grow will continue to support future development. They want to conserve the strategies that led to success.

However, this rarely works. A company’s needs change as it grows and its competitors will develop new, better technologies. Therefore, businesses need to continuously innovate – it’s more about culture than it is strategy.

The good news is that some innovation leaders have found ways to ensure innovation flows at their business. This results in genuinely useful technology that keeps their team happy and engaged at work.

Here are some ways to do this:

1. Create Horizontal Innovation Teams

Historically, innovation teams have been siloed in IT or product development departments. However, innovation programs are only valuable if all areas of the business feed into them. A horizontal innovation team helps achieve this by working across all departments. This allows them to gather ideas from across the organization and decide which ones will help achieve the company’s mission.

2. Run Brainstorming Sessions (Even Remotely)

One of the best ways to get buy-in from colleagues and management is to include them throughout the innovation process. This starts with brainstorming. By including stakeholders in brainstorming sessions, you get to see the issues that matter to them and give them a say in how to solve them.

However, hybrid working can make collaborating difficult. Successful innovation teams need a platform that allows them to share ideas. It should also allow them to identify the best ones and develop them further.

3. Prototype Quickly and Fail Fast

No-code platforms allow your innovation team to prototype, test and launch their own solutions without any technical knowledge. This means new ideas can be developed quickly and at a much lower cost. If they’re not suitable, they can fail fast or be quickly adapted. This de-risks the innovation process – you’ll no longer find yourself wasting time and budget on ideas that don’t work.

Ride the Innovation Wave

A wave of businesses worldwide are discovering how low-code apps can boost innovation for them.

These companies are more likely to provide employees with new tools to help them do their jobs, which keeps their people engaged and productive.

However, to achieve this, you first need to get buy-in from staff and colleagues alike.

In this article, we’ve proven that it can be done. Find out how you can accelerate your enterprise innovation in our webinar recording, Five impactful tips to accelerate your enterprise’s innovative success today. We’ll be speaking to Curt Carlson Professor Curt Carlson, an author and the CEO of Practice of Innovation.

 

Five impactful tips to accelerate your enterprise’s innovative success

Curt Carlson

    Founder and CEO @ Practice for Innovation

Carlson is also former President and CEO of SRI International – one of the world’s most innovative organizations. Under his leadership, SRI helped invent Siri, HDTV and the computer mouse. He also co-wrote the book Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want.