What is a Culture of Innovation?
A “culture of innovation” is a corporate environment that fosters and supports creative thinking, diverse perspective, and psychological safety. This culture cultivates new ideas and improved products by acknowledging and accepting different ways of thinking and development, both inside and outside of the organization.
Exploratory Innovation
When people first think about innovation, they think of game-changing ideas that cause revolutions. This type of innovation is considered exploratory innovation.
Exploratory innovations are designed to meet the needs of specific industry markets or emerging customer needs. Exploratory innovation creates new products or services that create new markets or reshape those markets. Examples of exploratory innovation would be social media, smartphones, and online shopping.
Exploitative Innovations
Exploitative innovations are designed for improving business products and service the existing market and existing customers. These types of innovations improve designs and expand services and products. If you are looking into how to improve business, exploitative innovations are the best for your business.
You will see an increase in your organization’s financial performance, even in those competitive environments. The best thing about exploitative innovation is that you can access information from the operational level of your organization.
Your employees who deal with customers daily are great resources. Your employees at all levels of your organization can contribute to innovation.
How to Create a Culture of Innovation
There are many fantastic ways to create a culture of innovation in your business, such as involving your employees. As mentioned earlier, your employees who work directly with your target audience and clientele know more about day-to-day operations. These employees understand the many pain points that need fixing to innovate and upgrade your company.
When you include your employees in the conversation, they feel as if they have some autonomy to find new ways to create solutions. Great leaders ultimately make the final decision, but they should never do it alone. Successful leadership is about listening, trusting, and empowering your teams to input their opinions and ideas.
Leverage Data to increase Value
Capitalize on the value of data through developing new data-driven products and services and revenue streams for an organization’s competitiveness. It will be key that data-driven insights are leveraged for enterprise-wide collaboration and decision-making to institute a knowledge-sharing culture.
Businesses transform, and data is the essential ingredient. Your data cloud can elevate your customer experiences, so you’re able to delight customers with rich and compelling experiences that are personalized, secure, seamless, and instantly responsive, no matter where they are or on which device. And a culture of innovation and a comprehensive data strategy can accelerate your digital transformation.
Failure is Ok but Psychological Safety is Key
Many people assume that failure is an end all be all in business, but that is not true. If your company does not have moments of failure, then you probably are not innovating as much as you need to be.
You should look at failures as opportunities to innovate to make the necessary changes to be successful. Failure will happen at any level of your organization. It is essential to learn how to pivot and adjust in these moments to keep your business running and improving.
“There’s no team without trust,” says Paul Santagata, Head of Industry at Google. He knows the results of the tech giant’s massive two-year study on team performance, which revealed that the highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety, the belief that you won’t be punished when you make a mistake. Studies show that psychological safety allows for moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind, creativity, and sticking your neck out without fear of having it cut off — just the types of behavior that lead to market breakthroughs.