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Contribute To Workplace Innovation

The document discusses workplace innovation, including defining different types of innovation and providing tips to create an innovative workplace. It suggests encouraging idea generation, exploring ideas without management, hiring innovative managers, valuing and rewarding new ideas, and encouraging diversity to promote innovation.

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Candy Zuen
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176 views

Contribute To Workplace Innovation

The document discusses workplace innovation, including defining different types of innovation and providing tips to create an innovative workplace. It suggests encouraging idea generation, exploring ideas without management, hiring innovative managers, valuing and rewarding new ideas, and encouraging diversity to promote innovation.

Uploaded by

Candy Zuen
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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INFORMATION SHEET 5.

1-1
What is Workplace Innovation?

Learning Objectives:
After reading this INFORMATION SHEET, You must be able to:
1. list the different types of innovation,
2. discuss the meaning of innovation in the workplace,
3. develop goals and ideas for workplace innovation.

Defining Innovation?
Innovation in its modern meaning is "a new idea, creative thoughts,
new imaginations in form of device or method". Innovation is often also
viewed as the application of better solutions that meet new requirements,
unarticulated needs, or existing market needs.

The main driver for innovation is often the courage and energy to
better the world. An essential element for innovation is its application in a
commercially successful way. Innovation has punctuated and changed
human history (consider the development of electricity, steam engines,
motor vehicles, et al).

How to Create an Innovative Workplace


Here are tips for solo practitioners and large organizations to boost a
company’s productivity and market share—
and fun quotient— right now.

Whether you’re in a team of one or a group


of 1,000, creating an innovative workplace
has become important for a business to
maintain competitiveness in the long run.
An innovative workplace is also a benefit for
employees; it creates a fun and exciting
place to work.

If you mostly work alone and haven’t


offered a new product or service to your customers in a while, then consider
new avenues or new approaches. Remember, if you don’t offer something
new to your customers, your competitors will.

Here are a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing:

 Look for small innovative extensions of what you already do, as


opposed to hunting for radically new ideas and inventions.
 Look at what your closest competitors are doing and see if you can do it better
in any way.
 Ask some of your customers what they need, but remember that it takes more
than one customer to establish a trend.
 Schedule some time to review your progress regularly. This can be anywhere
from weekly to monthly. You might need a colleague or advisor as a sounding
board to obtain more objective feedback.
 Consider a business partnership, strategic alliance or joint venture with
another small firm that has unique skills. Together, you might be able to offer
something more powerful to the market than each of you can individually.

If you work with teams, your situation is a little different. A published study by
Bledow, Frese, Anderson, Eres, & Farr (2009) analyzed over 150 research
studies on innovation and suggested that several factors can contribute to the
degree of innovation in organizations. Based on this research, their insights
about the characteristics of innovative workplaces include:

 Regular idea-generation meetings that focus on idea generation, not idea evaluation.
 Idea-exploration meetings to uncover benefits and risks without managerial
involvement.
 Encouraging small, incremental innovation rather than radical innovation.
 Hiring people, particularly managers, who will encourage improvements and innovation,
and be comfortable with the ambiguity, unknowns and challenges.
 Making innovation valued enough that it’s part of an employee’s performance criteria
and is discussed at review time.
 Supporting an innovative culture by minimizing strict and restrictive rules, guidelines,
policies or norms that get in the way of creativity.
 Rewarding new and successful ideas.
 Encouraging diversity in thinking, which is likely to lead to greater innovations.
 Practicing “proactive creativity,” whereby a worker identifies a work-related problem
and then identifies new ways to solve the problem. This has been successful with
production workers at manufacturers and with nurses in health care.

This is one of the crucial steps for organizations who are looking to drive a
culture of innovation. Driving innovative culture is not similar to running a
business, it needs a strategic approach that encourages the employees to
participate in innovative initiatives. Trailblazer can:

1. Be a frontrunner with imaginative thinking, holistic approach and a fine


balance of intuition and rational judgment.
2. Create positive belief about bringing innovative changes in the organization.
3. Create dynamic work culture where innovation is the only way to enhance
productivity.
4. Build in the confidence to express creative ideas.
5. Encourage innovative ideas to take risks and learn from failure.

Build Innovation Culture

Learning processes are critical aspects of innovation. The journey of


innovation that results in a sustainable, enterprise-wide adoption depends
on multiple factors.

Innovation is everyone’s job. In order to make it everyone’s job,


organizations need to develop key objectives transforming the company to
meet the challenges of a fast and challenging future.

Any organization that is about to build a culture of innovation needs to


establish: processes for high-quality learning conversations, socializing
platforms, idea management tools to gain a significant improvement in
creating and capturing ideas.

The late 20th century was a period of major social, economic and political
changes. It was the beginning of the so-called ‘Knowledge Age’, and if we
look at the 21st century, recent developments have been:
 The economic crisis and the budgetary constraints

 Social changes, such as an aging workforce or the breakdown of


traditional gender roles

 Technological innovation

 Knowledge-based work

 Globalization

Through these developments, professional roles, responsibilities, and even the


core definition of our ‘work’ has changed. For example:

 Jobs are now more in the service sector

 The technology involved in performing jobs are more sophisticated

 There is a need for more customer orientation

To cater to all of these, employees need to be willing to change and learn. So to


improve performance in today’s world, it is critical to increase the connection
that employees feel to their work.

A study by The McKinsey Global Institute shows that productivity improves by


20-25% in organizations with connected employees. Employees who are
motivated, find pleasure in their work. A similar study by Gallup indicated that
employees who are engaged in their work are 27% more likely to report
‘excellent’ performance.

However, despite these drastic changes and developments, in the majority of


the organizations, old structures and traditional management concepts are still
in place. These concepts are no longer being able to cater to the new mindset
and lives of the professionals, and this results in more burn-outs and drained
employees.
Types of innovation
In business and economics, innovation is often divided into five
types:
1. Product
innovation, which
involves the
introduction of a
new good or
service that is
substantially
improved. This
might include
improvements in
functional
characteristics,
technical abilities,
ease of use, or any
other dimension.
2. Process innovation
involves the
implementation
of a new or
significantly
improved
production or
delivery method.

3. Marketing
innovation is the
development of
new marketing
methods with
improvement in
product design
or packaging,
product
promotion or
pricing.

4. Organizational
innovation (also
referred to as social
innovation)
involves the
creation of new
organizations,
business
practices, ways of
running
organizations or
new
organizational
behavior.

5. Business Model
innovation
involves
changing the way
business is done
in terms of
capturing value
e.g. Compaq vs.
Dell.

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