We’ve been innovation consultants for over a decade and learned that most companies have a big-picture goal of fostering a culture of innovation — yet few truly understand what it means or how to recognize when they’ve successfully achieved it.
In our experience, a culture of innovation refers to a corporate culture where:
Employees and external innovation partners have a clear understanding of the company’s priorities and are always brainstorming, researching, and sharing new ideas that align with those priorities.
Employees have the power to bring new opportunities and threats to the attention of top management and change the direction of the company.
Employees can access all idea submissions via the idea management system and are encouraged to collaborate with the original author to improve them. Ideas aren’t siloed within a single department.
Departments receive funding from top management to explore promising ideas, along with guidance from innovation managers to evaluate and validate them. Ideas are turned into creative solutions that benefit the company, rather than sitting unused.
By fostering a culture of innovation, companies harness the creative thinking and problem-solving of their entire workforce, along with insights from external contributors like customers, researchers, and universities, to sustain innovation and improve efficiency.
Additionally, fostering a culture of innovation improves talent retention since employees are inspired by a company future they're co-creating.
Below, we explore 10 best practices commonly embraced by companies with the most thriving innovation cultures. We also share how we designed InnovationCast to support these best practices.
Learn more about how InnovationCast can help your company foster a culture of innovation by scheduling a 25-minute demo.
1. Develop an Innovation Strategy and Crowdsource Relevant Ideas
Crowdsourcing ideas is an effective way to kickstart a culture of innovation as it promotes meritocracy and ensures everyone has a voice — not just top management.
However, the way you crowdsource ideas plays a crucial role in shaping the effectiveness of your innovation culture.
Many companies create a Slack or Microsoft Teams channel and ask employees to submit any ideas. However, this "suggestion box" model has three limitations.
Employees submit any idea that springs to mind because they don't know what topics the company wants ideas on. Then, companies table most ideas because they don't relate to current priorities.
Employees submit generic, non-specific ideas because they don't have context around the complexities of the priority and what innovative solutions have already been explored.
There's little urgency for employees to submit their ideas because the suggestion box is always open. Employees say they'll do it later — but "later" rarely comes.
Instead, we recommend outlining problems the company is trying to solve and the goals it's trying to achieve with innovation, i.e., creating an innovation strategy and making it available to employees.
This way, employees can focus their efforts on submitting ideas that address initiatives outlined in the innovation strategy — the company collects ideas relevant to their topics of interest, not any ideas employees think of.
We won't talk too much about creating an innovation strategy, as we've covered that topic extensively in another article, which you can read here.
Below, we share how we designed InnovationCast with Innovation Challenges to help companies gather innovative ideas aligned with their priorities.
Use Innovation Challenges to Source Ideas Relevant to the Innovation Strategy
Innovation Challenges is an idea-collection feature that lets stakeholders create posts educating employees about a specific priority.
Stakeholders can create challenges for each aspect of their innovation strategy, such as cost reduction, new product development, and process improvement. Then, when they publish the challenge, InnovationCast notifies all team members that their input is needed.
Employees can review the information inside the challenge and brainstorm, research, and submit their best ideas.
This remedies the three problems with the suggestion box model:
Employees understand what initiatives the company is concentrating on and only submit relevant ideas.
Employees have an easier time grasping the nuances of the priority (i.e., what was tried before, what competitors are doing, etc.) because of the resources attached to the challenge. This helps them submit less generic ideas.
Innovation Challenges come with a closing date, so team members are less likely to procrastinate like they would with the suggestion box model.
Read more: How to Implement an Effective Idea Generation Process in Your Organization
2. Give Employees the Power to Shape the Innovation Strategy by Surfacing New Opportunities and Threats
Using challenges to collect ideas has its benefits. However, a mistake we see companies make is not providing employees with an outlet to share ideas that don’t relate to current priorities (an overcorrection influenced by past frustrations with the suggestion box). This causes them to miss out on new opportunities.
We recommend having an open call for ideas, where employees can surface new opportunities and threats that top management isn’t aware of. Then, if appropriate, top management must be flexible enough to change the innovation strategy to represent the new priority.
This creates a two-way dynamic where top management asks employees to submit innovative ideas aligned with the company’s strategy, while employees also have the power to change this strategy in response to new developments.
With this in mind, we designed InnovationCast with a Category-based “Always On” feature.
Use Category-based “Always On” to Surface New Opportunities and Threats
Category-based “Always On” is a bottom-up idea collection feature that allows employees to bring new opportunities and threats to the attention of top management that can potentially change the innovation strategy.
However, unlike the traditional Slack channel or company email address that accepts any idea, innovation managers and stakeholders can give employees loose guidelines on the topics they’re looking for ideas on. For example, they can have categories for continuous improvement, cost savings, product development, and emerging startups.
This approach ensures the company consistently uncovers new opportunities and threats, keeping them ahead of the competition.
3. Use Innovation Management Software to Facilitate Cross-Departmental Collaboration and Break Down Silos
A strong innovation culture requires employees to have insight into the ideas contributed by their colleagues. This creates a safe space for employees with diverse perspectives and skill sets (engineering, data science, accounting, etc.) to co-create with the original author and develop higher-quality ideas than any individual could achieve alone.
This type of company-wide collaboration and open communication also fosters a sense of community by valuing everyone’s input and giving each voice the potential to shape the final concept.
However, this step is not possible for most companies. Different departments use their own tools to collect ideas; only idea evaluators can access ideas once they’ve been submitted. This often leaves idea evaluators with raw ideas that they have to terminate or send back to the original author for refinement.
With innovation management software like InnovationCast, companies can support cross-functional collaboration and drive innovation by centralizing all ideas inside one dashboard. When someone submits an idea, their colleagues are notified and urged to suggest improvements.
How InnovationCast Facilitates Idea Improvement
All idea submissions are displayed on the InnovationCast activity feed for other users to see.
Users are encouraged to analyze the details of each other’s ideas, vote on what they think of them, and highlight any improvements the original author can make.
This visibility helps companies develop ideas to their full potential and cultivate genuine teamwork that’s difficult to recreate with ad hoc idea management systems.
Read more: How to Create a Collaborative Innovation Process and Network
4. Keep Idea Authors Informed About the Progress of Their Ideas
One of the biggest blockers to creating a culture of innovation and psychological safety is that many companies provide employees with zero insight into what happened to their ideas. Employees submit ideas via a Slack channel and never hear back about the progress. They don’t know if the idea is being assessed, validated, or implemented.
This leaves employees feeling discouraged, believing they wasted hours brainstorming and researching an idea that no one bothered to review. Over time, this lack of visibility and feedback can lead employees to entirely disengage from innovation efforts, handcuffing the innovation culture companies are trying to build.
Again, giving employees insight into their ideas simply isn’t possible within many companies. Ideas are submitted in one set of innovation tools, evaluated in another, and validated in yet another. There’s no centralized hub where the original author can submit their idea and track its progress.
This is one of the biggest challenges that we wanted to fix with InnovationCast.
How InnovationCast Provides Employees with Visibility into Their Idea’s Progress
InnovationCast offers centralized innovation labs where original authors and co-creators can see the progress of their ideas, from submission to implementation. If the company chooses, they can even give authors access to the reporting dashboard, where they can track the revenue and ROI their idea generates.
Allowing users to see what’s happening to their ideas boosts employee engagement and gives them a sense of purpose. Employees know their hard work contributed to something or is at least being reviewed.
5. Educate Employees on What Innovation Truly Is
A common reason employees hesitate to submit ideas is the belief that their suggestions aren’t “good enough” and that the company is only interested in groundbreaking innovations from product designers, scientists, and experts working in R&D.
However, employees fail to realize that the foundation of innovation is continuous improvement, i.e., refining live products, services, and processes. Revolutionary, once-in-a-lifetime ideas make up only about 5% of all ideas.
To foster innovation cultures and continuous learning, innovation managers must educate the workforce on the true meaning of innovation and challenge the status quo that prevents them from participating.
We understand that innovation managers don’t have the time to educate the entire workforce on innovation, so we designed InnovationCast with educational materials.
InnovationCast’s Educational Materials Help Companies Boost Participation Rates
InnovationCast clients get access to training programs such as short videos, articles, infographics, and case studies that teach them what ‘innovation’ actually means and that even small ideas can have a significant impact. These necessary resources break down barriers that prevent employees from participating.
However, not just the content of these resources matters, but also our delivery method. Our system sends short emails to new users daily, designed to be easily skimmed during their morning inbox check. They don't have to take an entire day off to learn about innovation. Plus, these daily reminders keep innovation top of mind.
6. Allow Participants Who Don’t Have Original Ideas to Get Involved
Only 30% to 40% of employees have original ideas to share. This is perfectly normal. However, companies with the best innovation cultures don’t limit participation to just those with original ideas. They offer opportunities for those without new ideas to contribute, allowing them to access different perspectives, not just the fraction of employees with original ideas.
A great way to do this is by encouraging employees to post the latest industry news and trends inside the innovation management system. When their colleagues sign in, they can view these resources, have internal discussions about their importance, and come up with new ideas.
We recommend this approach because it requires minimal creative effort and time investment from employees — all they need to do is share relevant news they encounter in their daily lives.
Facilitate Centralized News Sharing with Signals & Scouting
Signals & Scouting is a trend management feature in InnovationCast that enables employees to share important news.
By installing a browser plugin, employees can click the Signals & Scouting icon in the top right corner of their screen whenever they come across relevant information. The resource will then be automatically added to the InnovationCast news feed, making it accessible to others.
From there, other users can comment, initiate discussions, and formulate concepts. This crowdsourcing approach taps into the collective experiences of the entire workforce, helping companies stay informed about the latest opportunities and threats.
7. Reward Employees with Monetary and Non-Monetary Rewards
Introducing a rewards system can be an effective way to motivate employees to submit ideas.
The two common types of rewards are monetary and non-monetary rewards.
Monetary rewards include cash and items with cash value such as an iPhone or PTO. The key to issuing monetary rewards is basing them on the quality of ideas, not the quantity. For example, many companies offer rewards for submitting 10 ideas, but this doesn’t incentivize high-quality submissions.
What we’ve found to be effective is rewarding employees for each idea selected for validation or implementation. This approach compels them to submit high-quality ideas to earn their reward.
Non-monetary rewards can be just as powerful as monetary rewards. When someone submits an idea selected for validation or implementation, there’s a high likelihood the company will invite them to join the team working on the concept. This potential for career advancement strongly incentivizes employees to submit ideas.
Read more: How to Encourage Innovation in the Workplace
InnovationCast’s Badges & Rewards System
With InnovationCast, companies can set up reward systems and offer employees incentives for quality participation. These rewards can be PTO, cash prizes, movie tickets, career advancement opportunities, innovation sabbaticals, or anything else.
8. Establish the Steps Required to Move Ideas into Implementation
A culture of innovation isn’t just about running brainstorming sessions and sourcing innovative ideas. It’s also about developing these ideas into innovative products, services, and processes that drive company success.
If ideas aren’t being worked on and turned into real-world solutions, employees feel like all their hard work has gone to waste, so they stop submitting ideas. This hurts employee engagement and the culture of innovation.
To tackle this problem, we suggest that innovation departments design workflows that outline the steps needed to bring ideas to life. This way, everyone knows what they must do to move the idea forward.
Side note: Many companies ask innovation departments to evaluate and validate ideas themselves. We advise against this, as innovation departments often face staffing and budget constraints. It’s impossible for them to head every project. Instead, innovation departments should map out post-idea collection steps so each department can pursue ideas on its own.
InnovationCast’s Workflows Outlines How to Evaluate and Validate Ideas
InnovationCast comes with workflows that contain the tasks teams within the company must complete to evaluate and validate ideas. This provides structure to the steps after ideas are collected, ensuring they are actually worked on rather than laying dormant.
What differentiates InnovationCast from other innovation management platforms is that we have workflows customized around each idea type. We have separate workflows for process ideas, business model ideas, product ideas, and more. Most software provides a single, generic workflow, forcing all ideas to follow the same process.
We developed our workflows based on over a decade of hands-on experience managing innovation inside various companies, learning through trial and error what truly works.
You can also customize these workflows to suit your processes. You can do this by creating, removing, and rearranging task cards. You don’t need to code or contact our support team, although we will help you set up workflows during onboarding.
9. Avoid Funding Entire Validation Projects Upfront
Idea validation involves conducting experiments to determine whether an idea is worth implementing.
When funding innovation projects, a common error we see companies make is allocating the budget for the whole project upfront, without staged evaluations. This funding approach stems from enterprise companies knowing they have big budgets and believing there's no need to be frugal.
However, by funding the entire project at the beginning, cross-functional teams often gravitate toward designing costly and overly complex experiments. This limits the number of ideas companies can test.
Additionally, companies cannot retract the budget if certain ideas underperform because they have already allocated full funding. This fuels their decision-making and ensures resources don’t get tied up in ideas that aren't viable.
We've observed that companies with the strongest innovation cultures embrace a "fail fast" innovation mindset, validating ideas as quickly and cheaply as possible. This allows them to test more ideas compared to companies running elaborate, time-consuming experiments.
To cultivate a "fail fast" culture, we recommend that companies, including enterprises with substantial budgets, implement Metered Funding.
Use Metered Funding to Validate Ideas
Metered Funding involves giving validation teams smaller budgets to test a few key assumptions or hypotheses at a time. The next round of funding unlocks only after those assumptions are validated, and it is used to validate the next set of assumptions.
There are three benefits to Metered Funding:
Companies can validate more ideas at a lower cost: Validation teams must test assumptions as cheaply as possible because the entire budget isn't locked in. In turn, companies test more ideas with the same amount of resources.
Validation teams are held accountable: They must prove to top management that their ideas are working, or they risk losing funding.
Companies can easily reallocate resources: Top management can measure the performance of ideas and reallocate resources based on which ideas are living up to expectations.
Metered Funding fosters a culture where merit drives funding, and the best ideas receive the most resources. It also promotes meritocracy, as personal connections and hierarchies don't influence funding.
Read more: Idea Validation: A Guide to Affordably Testing Ideas
10. Use Open Innovation to Tap Into a Wider Pool of Professionals
Regardless of how talented your workforce is, it's unlikely that they'll be the smartest and most innovative individuals in every domain. Rarely does a single company house all the expertise needed to solve complex, multifaceted problems.
We recommend breaking down the barriers between external and internal innovation as it's essential to fostering a culture of innovation and risk-taking. It acknowledges the fact that the best ideas won't necessarily come from within the company and that you need to tap into a broader pool of knowledge.
This is known as open innovation. It entails inviting outside users, such as customers, partners, investors, researchers, students, universities, and so on, to review the details of the company's innovation strategy and submit their best ideas.
InnovationCast Gives Users Access to Thousands of Experts
InnovationCast has a partnership with HeroX, an open innovation platform that enables users to post challenges detailing the priorities they want to address with a deadline and a prize.
Thousands of experts in a variety of disciplines can view your challenge and submit ideas. This way, you can tap into top talent that goes beyond your workforce.
Foster a Culture of Innovation with InnovationCast
Schedule a 25-minute demo with our team to learn more about how InnovationCast can help you foster a culture of innovation.
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