Increase your innovation

While we aren’t conditioned to accept failure, it is actually the integral part of innovation.

The business culture in Canada tends to reward success, look at short-term results and champion the status quo. Those aren’t the right ingredients for innovation. Recognizing that failure is a critical element of success and creating the right culture in a company to encourage failure can spur innovation. That doesn’t translate into a model where rewarding failure removes accountability and creates a culture of mistakes.

Rather, if structured properly, empowering employees to challenge the status quo with their creative ideas without a fear of failing, can overcome an innovation deficit. It’s about making mistakes worth making and learning from those mistakes. In 2017, Facebook Founder, Mark Zuckerberg told Harvard University graduates that they shouldn’t be afraid of failing.

“In our society, we often don’t do big things because we’re so afraid of making mistakes that we ignore all the things wrong today if we do nothing,” he said. “The reality is, anything we do will have issues in the future. But that can’t keep us from starting. The greatest successes come from having the freedom to fail.”¹⁶

Being successful at embracing failure requires a culture shift in an organization – one that isn’t solely focused on the short term. It recognizes that challenging the status quo through creative ideas may not always work, but through failure, the organization learns from those mistakes.

As Shane Wall, Chief Technology Officer of HP, explains, successful leaders must empower their employees to make mistakes, learn from them, and innovate.

“You must fail, fail fast, and allow your employees to do the same. When your team recognizes they have the ability to fail, they can step outside of their comfort zones, learn from mistakes and truly innovate. From my experience, I’ve learned a company only grows when being pushed to think outside of the box.”¹⁷

How can you help your employees become more comfortable with failing?

• Feel the failure: Let everyone process their emotions and analyze what went wrong
• Communicate: Discuss the failure and encourage employees to be open about previous failures as well as lessons learned
• Be constructive: Encourage discussion about the lessons learned as well as the positive takeaways there are from the setback
• Celebrate failure that leads to innovation
• Promote failing fast: It’s a natural instinct to push harder to make something succeed, but knowing when to call it quits is essential

Solving customers’ challenges should be the basis of any innovation strategy.

Engaging customers by listening to their needs and challenges can boost your innovation journey. If you focus your internal processes on providing more customer value, you will ultimately gain a competitive advantage.

That’s been a successful part of Cogent Power’s business plan for more than 20 years, Ron Harper explains. “If you are part of your customer’s costs, you will be cut. If you are part of the value, you will be grown,” he says. “It’s a simple statement I learned in a marketing class, but one that I’ve used for 20 years because it’s so true.”

Engaging customers begins with two-way communication. Often, many companies believe that pushing out volumes of information to their customer base is a good way to keep them up-to-date on what’s going on in the company, but many overlook the need to pull customers back into the network by asking for their input.

Engaging customers could be as simple as sending out a survey seeking feedback or it may include direct interviews as well as performing in-depth market research.

Regardless of the method, engaging customers and utilizing their feedback is crucial to the innovation process.

Internal communication is another critical success factor to innovation. And opening the lines of communication in any organization starts at the top, with leadership. A culture that encourages open communication among departments better aligns the entire organization and breaks down silos – specific departments working independently – that can kill creativity and innovation. A bottom-up communication funnel gives employees at all levels of the company a way to be heard.

Collaboration is also key. Without it, it’s extremely difficult for an organization to develop the lifeblood of innovation: new ideas.

Management Expert Peter Drucker says that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. You also can’t improve it. Measuring innovation is necessary, but it’s not necessarily easy, as key performance indicators (KPIs) are unique to each company’s overall goals.

How do you measure innovation? Consulting firm InnovationLabs has developed a step-by-step guide that can be tailored to your company for developing metrics around innovation.

It also provides examples of both qualitative as well as quantitative metrics for each of the stages. For example, in terms of strategic thinking, qualitative metrics could include:

• Are we targeting the right parts of the business for innovation?
• Can we change as our markets do?

In terms of quantitative metrics for the first stage, it suggests:

• Time senior managers invest in innovation
• Time required from development of strategic concept to operational implementation
• Money invested in innovation

Investing in a highly-specialized workforce is a key driver of innovation in any company.

Skills are crucial for a firm’s ability to ability to put innovative ideas into practice and increase productivity, according to the UK-based Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC).²⁰

Research published by the ESRC in 2018 reveals that:

• There is a positive link between high-skilled workers and turning external knowledge into innovative output, but the linkage also extends to intermediate workers as well.
• The ability to feed innovative output into productivity depends on a firm’s full range of skill levels – not just skills associated with formal qualifications, but uncertified skills.²¹

Additionally, firms are placing greater emphasis on soft skills, particularly what the American Management Association calls the 4Cs – creativity, collaboration, communication and critical thinking.

A 2012 survey of 769 managers conducted by the American Management Association revealed that 74.6% of the managers surveyed believe that 4C skills will grow in importance with time.

Want to know more?

To learn more about developing a skilled, diverse team, read EDC’s e-book on skills How to Gain a Global Competitive Advantage Through Talent.