Stimulating creativity in your organization
Is your organization reaching its true creative potential? In other words, is your organization being stimulated to innovate?
At Be-novative, we have worked with various enterprises on their innovation goals and processes. After numerous experiences (and by numerous we mean with over 70 organizations), we identified some common innovation barriers that most groups seem to face. We compiled eight of them in a free ebook you can receive here.
Let’s go over one of them — it’s an important one and should also be a rather obvious one. Leaders can use their awareness of this common barrier as one of the cornerstones for creating a culture where everyday innovation takes place.
So what’s the barrier?
Uniformity.
Employees are often forced to innovate by top-down mandate, leading to reluctant, uninspired participation and questionable value. The tools for managing innovation can also hinder creativity by being either too simplistic, like a google form to submit an idea, or too process oriented with several bottlenecks. Without the right inspiration, interactive flow, methods or tools, people will contribute uniform inputs.
Simply put, innovation is about transforming creativity into tangible value. Without creativity, there is no innovation — you have to actively cultivate it. According to the World Economic Forum, by 2020 creativity will be in the top three skills needed to succeed in any professional environment.
To achieve breakthroughs, organizations should stimulate creativity and manage innovation in equal measures. Actively hire for creativity and also enable to creative mindset to emerge from each and every member of your team. Ensure that your mix of methodologies, tools, and practices are consciously infused with creativity-enhancing features.
The combination of the above will spark disruptive solutions.
Proactively stimulating creativity is an essential prerequisite to get out of the business-as-usual (the uniform) mode.
To conclude, listed below are some of our recommended actions:
- Make creativity one of the key skills you look for in potential employees.
- Provide a creative working environment. E.g. a wall decorated by employees, interactive lunches or team building events, flexible project teams.
- Induce collaboration. Enable people with diverse backgrounds to meet and share their perspectives and ideas.
- Organize workshops introducing lean, agile, design thinking, kanban, gamification, 6Sigma, 6Thinking Hats, random words and other creativity-enhancing methods or tools that people can build into their own processes.
- Use an innovation management tool with features that enhance creativity and keep the team inspired to come up with surprising solutions instead of generic ones.
Piggybacking on the last bullet point, we recently launched our tool with these ideals in mind. Do try it out for free! You and your peers will get to use an exclusive space built for creative collaborations.
No credit card required
Originally published at blog.be-novative.com.
