Here's how you can effectively convey the importance of innovation to your engineering team.

When discussing innovation with your team, highlight its tangible benefits. Explain how innovative approaches can address complex problems, enhance efficiency, and lead to groundbreaking products that significantly impact the market. Emphasize that innovation is not just a buzzword, but a crucial element for the company's growth and their personal development. By connecting innovation to concrete outcomes, you can inspire your team to adopt a forward-thinking mindset. This approach aligns well with engineering management principles, fostering a culture that values continuous improvement and creative problem-solving.

Conveying the importance of innovation to an engineering team needs to involve clear communication, practical examples, and fostering a supportive environment. we need to share the broader vision and how innovation aligns with it. Highlight how innovation drives growth, improves competitiveness, and meets customer needs. Show the team clearly how innovation can lead to personal growth, career advancement, and job satisfaction. Emphasize that innovative projects can provide opportunities for learning and skill development.

We always need to know the 'why' of something before we can commit to it. "Innovation" can be tough, as it can mean so many things. Make it clear the constraint you're trying to improve. here are a couple examples: "We need to show our customers we're responsive. We want to reduce release time from 6-8 weeks to 4 days." "We are spending too much on customer service. How can we enable the CS team to handle 2 or 3 times as many calls? Tooling? Authorisations?"

One must define innovation and creativity in the context of the problem they are solving. This factor is essential for team mindset, else it'll be chaos. Then formulate your end goal or vision and then have a desire that you would like to be fulfilled with the team's help. Then design structures such as sessions to brainstorm the problem, generate the solutions, evaluate the solutions, and iterate and repeat until you get your trajectory right and you slowly but continuously fulfill your desire. Design Thinking is a helpful framework.

Creativity must be one of the fundamental pillars of innovation, an engineer who cannot think in disruptive ways runs the risk of becoming a mediocre professional. It is up to leadership to motivate creativity and vision from other angles for both the creation and implementation of the project. New technologies emerge daily and it would be counter-intuitive to believe that they cannot be done better with fewer resources. Be the first to innovate by asking your employees' points of view and discussing all ideas with everyone in a participatory way, even the most hypothetical ones will help generate collective creative thinking.

Recognition works as a catalyst. When you feel that your contributions are being recognized and appreciated, you feel self motivated and know that your efforts matter. You will be looking for more innovate ways to contribute.