Creativeness and innovation are interrelated. Creative imagination unlocks the potential of the mind to devise new suggestions. Innovation is the labor needed to turn that idea into an actuality. Often innovation entails introducing change to well-entrenched systems. Therefore, first you come up with a great concept. After that, you take it to market. We are in a hot moment. To withstand the sudden changes in demand, you have to adapt to the new market situation. Here are life transforming thoughts on innovation and creativity;
1. Explore a New Technology Platform
Challenge your team(s) to come up with ideas by discussing how to utilize a particular new technology. Begin by exploring this new technology, answering questions, and then leaving the team for a brainstorming session. In the end, show your associates what they’ve created. For those who possess the skills, help them develop a model or proof of concept. ~ Andrew Howlett, Struck.
2. Be Transparent About Your Challenges.
If your team doesn’t know the fundamental problems for your company, their ideas for improving the business may be focused on the wrong things. By being transparent about your firm’s needs helps, you can inspire people to further develop ideas that can resolve the right problems.
3. Admit (and Learn From) Your Past Failures.
Begin by telling your new employees how you failed in the past. Company newbies expect to hear about your most successful achievements before they even consider joining your business, but if you lay out some rougher experiences, they may be inspired to implement new improvements in your company.
4. Build a culture of innovation
It all starts with you developing a supportive and innovative workplace culture that allows your staff to share ideas and bring innovative ideas to the team. Whenever there’s an idea no matter how extreme or weird it is, those words are the most important elements of a thriving innovative company culture.
Your employees need to feel it is all right for them to openly share their suggestions, ideas, and opinions, and that these contributions will be acknowledged, appreciated, and meaningfully taken into consideration. In order for your subordinates to develop this can-do attitude, ensure you lead them to avoid rigidly hierarchical departments and frequent cross-departmental communication sessions. Encourage your workers to put all of the ideas they generate into a digital suggestion box.
5. Surround yourself with innovative employees
The ability to create new ideas or build something independently might not be innate, and this is something that you could discover with practice, but someone can’t simply tell an employee to be creative. People are not known to be that creative, and they’re not always capable of opening their own creative doors through training.
That means you should look for team members who enjoy working with creative people, have creative hobbies, and think in unconventional ways. With that understanding, enhance the design of your interview process to find people who innovate differently from the crowd, have unconventional interests, and are good at coming up with creative ideas.
6. Embrace innovative technology
In today’s business world, there’s no innovation without being technology-driven. From business automation to software that can be incorporated into all the major and minor processes in nearly every department, there are many imaginative ways that you can apply modern technology to spark innovation. Even if it enhances your workers’ productivity, it will help them develop essential tools.
Based on the present day, think of your ability to combine contemporary technologies with evergreen solutions to cater to the entire modern market. As an example, by blending comprehensive phone systems for small business with digital customer service tools, you can easily address the requirements of clients with every type of service while streamlining your workflow and measuring performance of your employees.
Keep in mind that the enigmatic is an essential part of modern culture, so ensure that you marry traditional with the modern to spark innovative thinking across the board.
7. Encourage People to Use Their PTO
Encouraging individuals to take their forfeit of vacation may not be an obvious means to encourage innovation, however, it is. When someone’s employees are worn out and tired, they’re not as productive or creative. Reminding them of their existence can enhance their mental health and lets them return to work with a clear mind that can think more creatively.
8. Reward Experimental Behavior
If you want to have just innovative staff, then uplifting and encouraging experimental behavior is beneficial. If they try something new and that ends up benefitting our company, you can issue a press release and/or reward them with a gift certificate or some other form of compensation. Once you have started showing your appreciation, your whole staff will engage in that same good behavior and you’ll be exhibited the outcome you desire.
9. Assemble teams for this purpose
Some of the members of the organization are so busy bolstering the daily operations that they do not have sufficient time or resources to brainstorm or direct. Rather than struggling to make innovative improvements until an opportunity that occurs (which will never do), you should devote some of your resources to creating departments and divisions designed specifically for this.
You may have a great venture at the outset that you’ve only been dreaming about, but once you’ve branched out and begun to master a new field with a sensitive staff, it could affect the future of your company. For your sake, ensuring this group stays intense and committed to your business’ excellent performance will be vital for the long-term success of your venture.
10. Strategy innovation
When making future (forward) plans, it’s imperative that people can develop ideas for the future and take the time to consider how they could impact a certain department, team, or whole company. The productive application of innovative thinking with regard to share capital, expansion strategies, new business ventures, or collaboration methods provides numerous opportunities for developing new approaches to current issues.
11. Product or service innovation
The initial thing people contrast with respect to business venture options may be the prospect of developing new products or services. It could be a “push” (offering a fresh design and helping the customer to make use of it) or a “pull” (identifying an specific customer need or “pain”, which branches of into a new service or product).
Whether a company implements a tactic that requires initiative or allows its growth, initiatives to consider may consist of new business or adapted products or services, extensions or enhancements to products or services, or services that offer added value.
12. Process Innovation
Companies usually tend to emphasize their operational efficiency, that is, how their processes function on all levels compared with others or “best practices.” Areas to consider include the adoption of popular Process Management Systems, processes, and operational technologies and potential improvements and “agile” approaches.
13. Marketing Innovation
Marketing evolved into a center for innovation rather than being viewed as just a cost center when marketing abandoned traditional ways of conducting business in favor of encouraging business owners, entrepreneurs, and chief marketing officers to think across boundaries.
Working together towards one vision will guide not only how the firm’s marketing but also the business in general progresses. When a business emphasizes creativity along with speed and customer obsession, it can forge a brand that matters to customers.
Marketing innovation (including selling) focuses on new methods to promote products and services, including new/different channels to market, clearer brand differentiation and positioning, and innovative approaches to customer service.
14. Give People a Say in Company Decisions
Allow your employees to participate in decision-making processes and give them the choice to air their opinions and ideas. The members of your staff are your company’s grounding, so attentively paying attention to what they have to say will facilitate innovation.
15. Sales Innovation
Sales assortment is increasingly transferring from producer to consumer by means of web-connected and frictionless operations, making it possible for everything from payments to logistics, shipping, and production to be delivered in a streamlined and transparent single network.
Once you’ve perfected the way you sell your products, you will then really need to think about how to include innovation to your sales process. Doing away with conventional limitations when it comes to your customers’ ease of access to the information you want them to have can help you get the most out of their purchase of your products. Businesses that promote the outflow of full information regarding customers will all flourish equally.
It is so important for your customers to relate to your products so that they can make up their minds on your own product. Deciding the information that is best suited to your customer at the right time is so critical because people only buy under specific circumstances.
16. Leadership & management
Well-known innovation methods almost always focus on leadership and management. Innovative innovation usually comes from the top. Senior leaders must help their teams understand the importance of innovation and inspire them to understand in concrete and tangible ways to take responsibility for new ideas and solutions.
Developing new strategies to lead and rally through creative problem solving can be challenging, but we’ll discuss several ways we can apply certain aspects to improve our approach.
17.Empower your employees to think about tough problems
Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple Inc., once shared, “It doesn’t make any sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” This is key to motivating workplace innovation: give your employees the ability to come up with inventive solutions to problems, and compensate them for doing so.
People are likely to become as innovative as you allow them. If you enable your staff to pursue their ideas, you will soon be rewarded with a more creative and energetic workplace.
18. Adopt a non-hierarchical management approach
Making your workplace conducive to innovation may end up being very hard, especially if you’re rigid and unobservant. You have to be assertive if you are still a newcomer in your workplace, otherwise you could fail to help your organization’s innovations flourish.
The most progressive organizations have a geometry that’s flat but organized: They make forgoing the hierarchical differentiation between teams and teams as well as the elimination of an unnecessarily rigid wall between areas of work. A lot of innovations come from cross-pollination between team members and teams as well as the exchange of problems and ideas.
Tesla is a worthy instance of Elon Musk’s flat management structure. It requires a highly hands-on approach from upper management and gives employees the freedom and resources to work individually across different departments.
19. Give your staff a reason to care
To truly innovate, your staff should start with some experience in the game. They shouldn’t bet on the idea of innovation as an idea for the business chief to think of – instead, innovation should be part of every team member’s job.
Encourage employees to pursue change by finding methods to introduce them alongside you with a companywide innovation strategy.
A great example is a great instance of the company DHL. The company’s leadership encourages its staff to work with a variety of customers to come up with ways to address major difficulties, such as creating a delivery sequence to free workers from collecting in remote hubs. The outcomes of this collaborative strategy can be more innovative ideas from the team.
20. Technology Innovation
Highly innovative new technologies can be both disruptive and transformative, but technology adoption can also be gradual, such as just automating a manual process. Cognitive technologies like automation can thus be incorporated in various ways, whether through planned technology updates such as buying new tablesitting apps or upgrading hardware such as upgrading point-of-sale gadgets.
21. Supply Chain innovation
Enterprises can rapidly market their products and solutions worldwide using innovative thinking and technological systems to use their supply chain procedures from distributor to end user. To help you take advantage of this untapped potential, businesses should begin rethinking their business models, buying or manufacturing determinations, and the robustness of their supply chains.
22. Organisational Innovation
Alternatives also exist for any technological approach. They can also, however, be applied to a person’s work methods, such as the way they think and act. No matter an employee’s level of operation, innovations can be modified to improve customer-facing functions of any company.
To keep up with an organisation’s innovation, you could seek new ways to work with or communicate among staff members.
Synergizing different functions of teams can generate new concepts, transforming work processes and upending disciplinary roles.
23. People Innovation
A culture of continuous innovation requires that a top level of control be covertly motivated to continually innovate, while recruiting those who will continue such efforts across the entire company. But however you perform this—i.e. whether you’re ‘people as promoters’ or leadership—it’s important to efficiently encourage a culture of innovation.
24. Find and motivate intrapreneurs
Having intrapreneurs in your business who already work for you is a great alternative to hiring regular entrepreneurs to spearhead innovation. They should be thought of as entrepreneurs that are already working for you.
Finding and motivating innovators inside your business is an effective strategy to encourage a more innovative approach to problem-solving.
As an example, a software company named Fishbowl helps build an internal entrepreneurial base within the company. These staffers are then utilized by the company to carry out valuable innovation.
25. Innovation owner and enabler
Board members and high-level managers should have the ability to delegate ownership of projects, giving them both the control and support they need from a Project Manager. The “innovation owners” are in a position to understand how a company functions and what its customers need.
26. Innovation team as driver
The managers of an initiative have a direct impact on the project’s performance. But one feature of an initiative, such as its failure, can mean a bad experience for all participants involved. Consequently, the success of an initiative depends on the team contributing to it and their efforts.
Bring together the right group of stakeholders, including people who can accurately represent the requirements of customers and the company. This is needed for maximum innovation success.
27. External roles in innovation management
External stakeholders and industry specialists with specialized knowledge also have an important influence on innovation undertakings.
28. Encourage your people to think about innovation on a daily basis
Returning to the exciting potential of your employees’ imaginative potential should never be seen as an escape from daily life, but rather as something to encourage on a regular basis. If the notion of new approaches isn’t seen as something to or only for retreats and workshops, the innovators on your team will not utilize their full potential when working with their company.
Alongside your work, permit your employees room to develop ideas that use inventive thinking. As an example, 3M’s is known for its policy of giving its employees 15% free time each day for creative contemplation.
Of course, this doesn’t mean forgiving 15% of a timeframe for staff to stop working and allow themselves to rest at their desks. Engage your employees in conversations about the new ideas and concepts they came up with during innovation sessions.
29. Embrace co-creation and open innovation opportunities
On the subject of innovation, don’t be afraid to solicit ideas from your family and friends, too. After all, your die-hard fans are the people most likely to have brilliant ideas for new products and/ or services – especially if they use your services and products on a daily basis.
Starbucks’ “My Starbucks Idea” site was in operation for nearly a decade, and obtained more than 150,000 suggestions from devoted Starbucks fans during that time.
This not only resulted in the coffeehouse chain’s creation of mainstream products, including Hazelnut Macchiatos and pumpkin spice lattes, but also gave Starbucks a firm group of enthusiasts to use for market analysis purposes.
30. Participate in an innovation hub
Unique locations for company representatives to communicate about their innovations have increased in popularity over the past decade. There are now thousands of these places around the world.
A concept that revolves around the need for a multidisciplinary approach to innovation and the importance that collaboration has in problem-solving can be illustrated through the concept of an innovation hub. Innovation hubs can be valuable for implementing “blue-sky” thinking.
Locate innovative hubs in your region then use your team’s skills to convey your idea.
31. Recognize and reward successful innovations
In order to get the best out of your workers when it comes to innovation, you’ll need a way to recognize and reward successful new ideas — especially when they may facilitate savings or contribute to an increase in revenue.
Just being courteous or having public recognition can be quite an effective form of expression, for instance, giving out honors at staff roadshows. However, if you also want to give your employees flashy awards, we know they won’t mind!
32. Ensure staff psychological safety
It’s important to get this component right. After all, employees don’t want to be put off by ideas for innovation that create potential risks involved with their jobs. Your employees need to be able to be candid and straightforward when it comes to developing new technologies and products, without risking negative consequences for their positions.
The very first thing you have to do when you plan to introduce innovation is come up with ground rules and create a shared understanding that the risks will be minimal if any if the innovation process weren’t to be successful.
33. Organize your office for maximum innovation
Office layout and interior design can make a profound difference in an innovation-friendly office. Something as trivial as the place of particular teams in your office can have a substantial impact on creativity and promote teamwork.
Google’s office setups incorporate amenities such as putting greens, vintage subway cars, and revolving bookcases. Yet, you don’t need to spend on gimmicks to be like Google. Instead, you can learn from how Google puts teams together to learn from each other, and from creating spaces in which informal meetings and information sharing is more probable to happen.
These choices don’t have to be complicated – it might simply be reorganizing your seating chart to encourage staff to share ideas and knowledge.
34. Use tools to create time and space to innovate
There are plenty of software engineering solutions available to companies. Whether you go for project management tools, online collaboration platforms, or cloud-based accounting applications, there are a wide range of tools to save time on basic procedures.
These software programs are not only helpful with minimizing stress – they can also provide a competitive advantage by allowing your staff to become more focused on creativity and innovative thinking.
A great place to start is to learn about the variety of software products available today, and decide on how to put this time savings to good use.
35. Consider innovation software
Innovation and creative thinking aren’t matters of gift. With the right tools, processes, and methods, anybody can become a thinker and discover new solutions to complex problems.
Software can be developed to facilitate innovation management by creating a structure for collaboration, communication, and idea formation. Utilizing the right tools, you can create an ideation culture throughout your entire company.
36. Boost creativity
When you want to brainstorm ideas, creativity comes first. Creativity stimulates different forms of thinking, so games, playfulness, and did you know that water relaxes you? will all help you develop your creativity. Being near water, such as a lake or ocean, has been shown to prolong brain waves and tenderize you by placing you into restful neocor dumberness.
Lay aside all of your inhibitions to express yourself and you’ll have more creative ideas. Additionally, it’s important to take advantage of all the chances your mind gives you. Offer your mind a break when you forget something and go to sleep, engage in a hobby, or take a shower. The insights your mind generates when you forget stress and strain are so important to creativity.
37. Find inspiration
There are other businesses implementing brand-new solutions that could be an inspiration for you. You don’t have to work in your specific industry in order to be innovative. Actually, learning from how other businesses address issues is fascinating research that you can use to find a suitable path. Do universities in your locality keep publishing new studies? What new businesses are appearing in your neighborhood, and what new services do they provide? Go with some of the people who have been inspired.
I enjoy baking, and my daughter also loves it, because I learned from my mom. When we bake together, I get inspired by new recipes, new dietary regulations that affect the substances we can use, and the chemistry that determines where I can push the envelope and must follow the rules.
I am also inspired by my preteen daughter’s growing mind and the delight I feel inventing with her. When I return to work, I’m invigorated with new approaches to thinking, interacting with, and relating new ideas to existing systems.
38. Be willing to fail
Innovation requires making some cracks, so be sure to allow yourself to experiment with several options to find the most effective approach. Set FAIL to your First Attempt In Learning and see what comes up from it. This may prove challenging since you typically work hard every day to achieve victory. So take some new steps with your work association or team and fail together on the way to innovation.
Consider challenging each team member to come up with four new ideas, at least three of which will fail. Give the event a set number of weeks and book a conference call at the end of each week to compare efforts and results. Give fun awards for the most spectacular fails and the most creative efforts. Integrate conversations along the way into the innovation process. Watch how the space to try and the space to fail open new ways to think about possibilities.
39. Question your assumptions
Individuals often do things a particular way because they have been practiced that way since childhood. Now is a great time for you to examine everything about your long-held beliefs and behaviors in a systematic fashion. If you need to use this as an active, conscientious practice, then you must communicate with interlocutors.
Explain some topics to take a look at, have your partner ask second thoughts to your statements, and then follow each and every new option to its logical conclusion. How did they contrast to your current beliefs or those patterns? Looking through different perspectives opens up a new way of thinking.
40. Agility And Creativity
If you’re doing something that’s been done before, there’s a good chance someone else is already right behind you. Once you incorporate a new innovation, bigger companies might adopt it as well, potentially arriving at a solution sooner than you otherwise could.
A company must be capable enough to pivot in offering new solutions and be able to absorb and process the relevant information quickly, too. This doesn’t mean abandoning the overall goal, but you do need to have flexibility to assimilate fresh info and concentrate on the matter.
Uber began with the transportation of black cars for local VIP trips, however, it was able to quickly add new features to its business while continually concentrating on its greater mission. Similarly, Filament has been able to update its process in response to new regulations in the marketplace, new technological innovations, and new market entrants. However, this can be a benefit.
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