What’re the Key Factors to Innovate at both Individual and Organizational Level

People who can solve the problems in a new way are innovators.

Effective and sustained innovation within an organization is rare. Having innovation as a core function, fully supported and funded by executive management with high levels of stakeholder participation is rare. But that is a choice. Every organization has the capacity to innovate both as one of the initiatives or in a sustained way; both at the individual level and organizational level. But more specifically, what’re the key factors in catalyzing business innovation?

At the organizational level, leadership is crucial to building a culture of innovation: At the organizational level, transformational innovation won’t take place if their core tendencies in their business life cycle aren’t identified and overcome. Unlearning what a company has learned is part and parcel of fixing what is broken. Companies of all sizes, especially large corporations, are designed to suck at innovation. Because they become too dependent on satisfying corporate regulation or protocols, and never get around to developing a culture that fosters/rewards innovation until it is too late. It takes true leadership; with less protocol, to listen to the other people in the company, in order to build a culture of innovation. And you won't unlearn dogma by having leaders who created the dogma be the leaders of rules and structures for innovating. But more often, leaders want to NOT change and to control, under most circumstances, as change takes their agendas away. There is also NO such thing as transformational innovation unless the owners and stockholders buy-in. Innovation is not a lifestyle of a company, but events that trigger the innovation or the necessity. Innovation and standardization are not opposite but have to go hand-in-hand, to make innovation sustainable and business more mature.

At the individual level, courage, passion and out of box thinking are key factors for innovating: Anyone is capable of innovating if they are capable of silencing the noise in the mind, and thinking outside the conditioned mind and without fear. Innovation is all about the madness of solving problems and doing things in an easy way. Innovation comes with the increased knowledge and understanding of facts. You never know how innovative you might be in some field before encountering the problems and before the adoption of solutions. Individuals will be more innovative if they are so passionate about the jobs that they live it on their own time (work related hobbies, testing theories, products, and applications). If that kind of employee is working for you; not only do you have assurance you are getting value for the compensation you are spending, but get better results

• The innovators are simply those who can see what's around, and easily and effortlessly discover a better way to do things;
• People are capable of innovating if they are capable of silencing the noise in the mind and thinking outside the conditioned mind and without fear.
• Nonlinear thinking and whole brain thinking provide more opportunity for innovation than linear thinking.
• People who can solve problems in a new way are the innovators. What many see as innovation is actually problem-solving: a simple process of deduction to derive a solution drawing from knowledge, experience or a pool of data.

Practice, practice and practice more with relevance to innovation; doing more results in more opportunity for innovation. Creative people are inspired to think and work nearly every day on creating, they are not waiting for such “Aha” moment, but proactively stimulate the new energy of fresh thinking; at organizational level, it’s all about how to build the creative work for striking the right balance between encouraging rule-less thinking and building rigorous processes to enforce risk management, and moving organizational maturity from efficiency, effectiveness to agility.

Posted in: Innovation