Creating a Culture of Innovation

Organizations of all sizes are actively seeking to become more innovative. They know that in order to survive and thrive they must constantly evolve to keep out in front of their competition. However, in this quest to become more innovative, one of the biggest challenges they're facing is changing their corporate culture to enable and embrace innovation.

It's certainly no wonder that with a focus on cost-cutting and process development, we've fostered corporate cultures focused on operational excellence and risk avoidance. Further on, by limiting responsibility for innovation to a specific function, organizations are not fully leveraging the capabilities of other employees.

Organizations must create a culture of innovation that permits a "fail-safe" attitude and harnesses the creativity of its customers and employees. Proactively leading change (vs. "managing it") can be a key enabler for creating the culture needed to take your company to the next level. After all, as they say: change happens. It's whether you harness it or not that counts.

Our approach includes:

Developing and getting aligned on PRIORITIES – Aligning company leaders and organization on a common vision of innovation

• Helping leadership define and communicate their innovation priorities
• Redesigning organization structure and job roles for optimal innovation

Galvanizing PEOPLE – Developing a disciplined approach to building innovation capabilities

• Focusing recruiting and hiring strategies towards bringing capability on-board
• Implementing training and mentoring programs aimed at developing the mindset and skills of innovation
• Realigning performance objectives to enable innovation

Adopting PROCESS – Applying a systematic approach and tools to enable idea generation, pipeline and portfolio management

• Ensuring that processes and tools are in place to rapidly redeploy resources behind promising new ideas
• Working to eliminate operational gaps so ideas, capital and resources can be brought together quickly

Evolving CULTURE & VALUES – Promoting a collaborative culture and incentives that reward desired actions

• Developing rewards and recognition platforms that encourage innovation