Setting an Innovation Culture

Your employees must have the right attitude in order to come up with and develop innovations.

Any organization has its own particular patters of behavior that are underpinned by values and beliefs--its organizational culture. If you want to develop an innovative organization, creating the right culture is the biggest challenge.

Your employees must have the right attitude in order to come up with and develop innovations. An organization that operates a blame culture--in which mistakes are punished an instigators of new projects are made scapegoats when they fail--will discourage innovative thinking.

On the other hand, a more open culture in which mistakes are treated as opportunities to learn and develop new strategies, will be more likely to encourage innovation.

ACTION POINT: Discourage the attitude that current systems are perfectly fine, or "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," so that employees are constantly thinking of how their processes could be improved.