Innovation culture the heart of generating sustainable business.

Innovation culture the heart of generating sustainable business.

Topics covered in this blog post:

• Why should you care about your company's innovation culture

• What is innovation culture

• How do you build a system for innovation culture

Innovation culture the heart of generating sustainable business.

Why should you care about your company's innovation culture?

I believe building a thriving innovation culture is the key success factor for a company to build long term success stories, great customer service and sustainable financial success.

A well working innovation culture enables your organisation to stay ahead of the competition and empowers your employees to innovate every day. 

What is innovation culture and how can you build it?

Before going into how you can build an innovation culture let’s take a step back and understand what I mean with innovation culture. 

Innovation culture is the reflection of innovative behaviours of all the people in your company. As a result of that behaviour, innovative ideas are tested and implemented continuously. 

Sure, there is no black and white when it comes to innovation culture; it is rather a mix of a lot shades of grey. To simplify this, I will dive into two extreme examples as a base.

Culture A:

Imagine you work in a company which is working in a top down management style. Your manager is supervising you in all details and will take decisions on behalf of you. If he/she detects that something is off, you immediately get told what to correct and focus on correcting it. How would you feel? What would your behaviour as a consequence be? How would you talk about this with your colleagues?

Culture B:

On the contrary put yourself into a situation where your manager is enabling you to make decisions yourself, within your expertise area and your experience. Imagine a meeting with your manager where you openly discuss your concerns and you can suggest how things should be done differently. A meeting where your manager listens and you take the decision at the end of the meeting. How would you feel in this situation? What would your reaction be? How would you tell others about this?

In my view every well functioning innovation culture is based on an implemented and well curated people centric company culture like I explained in Culture B. You can imagine that in the example of Culture A innovation will be an exception if your employees are not feeling your trust and therefore I take Culture B as a base going forward in my descriptions below.

On top of the people centric culture exemplified in Culture B, you have to implement a systematic way to enable your employees to innovate and learn from their mistakes on an ongoing basis. 

How do you build a system for innovation culture?

Building innovation culture doesn’t happen overnight, you will need to be patient and always keep the bigger picture in mind. There is no one fits all, you always have to adapt towards your industry, existing company culture, country culture and individual differences of people in your company.

To get to the goal of a thriving company innovation culture you have to build a system that helps you as a GPS to navigate towards the future goal.

Next blog post of the Innovation Culture Guide:

2/5 The leader makes the difference.

• How you as a leader can make the difference

• Manager vs Leader

• The 6 steps to build your leadership manifesto towards innovation culture