BUILDING A CULTURE OF INNOVATION AND CREATIVITY IN YOUR START-UP

One good idea, well executed can create value for your customers but it takes an established culture of innovation and creativity to sustain value creation in the business. Innovation is not only critical to superior business performance in today’s fiercely competitive business environment but also engenders sustained performance. One decision you will make today and will resonate all through your business lifespan is to make innovation a key element that drives your operation.

The lesson from the most innovative companies in the world has revealed that innovation is not a function of your spending. You can spend all you want on innovation, but you can’t guarantee success. According to Booz & Co’s global innovation study, the most innovative companies are not necessarily the biggest spenders. I suppose this is some good news for you as you may not have extra bucks earmarked for pursuing innovation. Building an innovation powerhouse start-up begins with establishing a culture that is innovation –centered. Culture is the foundation of your company, and culture comes from people, and not theory. Culture gives your company the required momentum to fly. Building a culture of innovation requires a collaborative effort of your employees. Innovation is a team sport. Each person needs to feel that they matter, that the outcome wouldn’t be the same without their contribution.

In the days of your little beginning the following can help weave innovation into the fabrics of your organization:

1. CLARIFY YOUR COMPANY’S PURPOSE. Innovation runs on the wheel of purpose. Purpose clarified infuses energy and drive to go beyond what is and to persevere until something extraordinary has been created. When the purpose of your start-up is clarified, it becomes the value-creating energy- multiplying life force of innovation.

2. ASK REPEATED QUESTIONS AND LISTEN. You must develop a habit of curiosity and openness. Ask questions and listen deeply. From time to time, ask customer-focused and employee-centered questions. Be sincere enough to solicit feedback from both your customers and employees. It will help you gain insight into customer needs. Strive to ask the extra question to challenge yourself and others to go deeper and stretch further. Constantly seek diverse viewpoints. Constant inquiry and questions form the linguistics of innovation. Adopting a habit of questioning in your organization will constructively challenge your people’s thinking, strategy and behavior through the lens of innovation. Stretch them to create, innovate and envision alternative future. Grow your people to grow a culture of innovation.

3. RISK EXPERIMENTATION. One clear attribute of an entrepreneur is risk taking. Lead your start-up to develop courage to accelerate through failure by building momentum and speed through new learning. Experimentation steers us to our eventual destination through roadblocks, twists, and turns, as long as we are learning agile and courageous enough to persist. Step back to make sure that your behaviors, systems and processes are not barriers to risk experimentation. Ensure your key people are encouraged to spend at least 15percent of their time exploring and prototyping new ideas. This will help your people take responsibility as Innovation officers of some sort.

4. REWARD CREATIVE IDEAS. Put a system in place that will adequately reward creative ideas. Creative ideas generation can be fostered across all levels by installing a suggestion system, in which every employee will be encouraged to make suggestions for improvements of any kind. Once the company adopts any creative idea, ensure the sponsor of such idea is rewarded. For instance, Toyota through employee suggestion system among other methods creates new innovation at the breakneck speed of over 2,500 new ideas implemented every day. It implements one million new creative ideas each year.

5. DO IT LIKE THE BIGGIES. Inside the big companies today is a common practice of assigning responsibility of chief Innovation Officer. As a start-up, designating an employee to co-ordinate the innovation movement across the organization makes it clearer to the team you place a premium on innovation. Companies that are very serious about building innovation right into the culture of their business have a designated innovation officer. Mind you, designating Chief Innovation officer is not meant to institute another corporate bureaucratic process that can stifle innovation, rather to ensure its free flow and accountability. The Chief Innovation officer is not one all-knowing genius that will generate all the great ideas, rather his role among others is to create and oversee an enabling environment that allows for process and business innovation. He is also expected to be able to evaluate ideas with a new mindset, to uncover innovation.

However, successful innovators focus on what matters most rather than spreading their effort and resources on capabilities that are less critical. With better focus and alignment, they are able to innovate more effectively, bring their innovation to the market more efficiently, boost top-line growth and reduce relative costs -- all at the same time.