What do you do if your organization needs a boost in innovation?

When innovation stagnates, it's not a signal to retreat, but a call to ignite the spirit of creativity within the organization. Embrace curiosity as your compass, and collaboration as your fuel. Foster an environment where diverse perspectives converge, sparking the flames of ingenuity. Empower every individual to champion change, for in the pursuit of innovation, we redefine possibilities and chart a course towards boundless growth and impact.

If your organization needs a boost in innovation, the first step is to clearly define your innovation vision by identifying what innovation means for your organization and how it aligns with your overall business strategy. This vision should articulate a future state where innovation drives growth, competitiveness, and addresses key challenges or opportunities in your industry. Establish concrete, inspiring goals that motivate all levels of the organization to engage in creative thinking and problem-solving, ensuring the vision is communicated effectively to foster a culture that supports and values innovation.

In today's world, innovation is not merely an option, it is a necessity. Leaders play a crucial role in defining innovation vision that support organization's strategic vision and sets a favorable context for innovation to driving actual value. Vision is not enough, it should be supported by - Culture of Trust and Creativity that allow employees feel comfortable sharing their ideas and expressing their viewpoints. - Leaders must provide the necessary resources, including human and material resources, to enable tangible results. Last but not least, leaders must allow for errors and failures, understanding that they are an inherent part of the innovation process. This enables employees to learn from their mistakes and continuously improve.

Innovation will come from employees in an organisation. What organisations need to foster innovations is to give a route for these ideas to be surfaced to leadership team on frequent basis and for these ideas to get approved/declined regularly. Setting a framework/template for these ideas (e.g. an idea should have a client problem/business opportunity, high level effort estimate and a clear ask) will help create a healthy backlog of innovation ideas and will help speed up the approval process.

Start innovation with communication and collaboration style. When you lack innovation something is wrong with people being stuck in old habits. However, we were born with instincts to discover the new, try out things...make people curious again.

To build your innovation capabilities, start by investing in the development of your team's skills and knowledge, focusing on areas that drive innovation such as creative thinking, digital literacy, and technical expertise relevant to your industry. Foster a collaborative environment that encourages experimentation and the sharing of ideas, providing both the physical and digital tools necessary to prototype and test new concepts efficiently. Additionally, create processes that support innovation, such as setting up cross-functional teams, implementing idea management systems, and establishing metrics to measure the impact of innovative initiatives.

Investir em recursos, talentos e processos que promovam a criatividade e a gera??o de novas ideias é fundamental para impulsionar a inova??o.

In a learning culture people will start to discover the new. One example could be: send your key people to trainings of the Hyerscalers, put them on a certification journey. People get in touch with new technology (Cloud & AI), new agile methods, new ways to collaborate via modern tools. It will create mindset for innovation. You get the capabilities along the way naturally. It is like we were kids. Try out, stumble, stand up, try next thing...engage with your team mates...etc.

Establishing a culture of innovation is paramount, and enabling individuals and teams to fail forward and fast, without punitive measures, facilitates improvement on existing innovations. This fosters collaboration, empowers employees, and embraces diversity and inclusion. Essentially, this encourages employees to learn and adapt to new methods or find solutions to address existing and novel challenges. Setting clear goals and objectives is crucial for tracking progress and measurement. Celebrating these successes keeps teams motivated and eager to achieve more.

Your IT strategy should cater to provide for sandbox like environments to developers and teams create a proof of concept/ prototype without them having to wait for month long approval process.

It's time to foster a culture of creativity and exploration. Encourage brainstorming, experimentation, and risk-taking. Provide resources, support, and incentives for innovative ideas. Embrace diversity and collaboration to drive fresh perspectives and breakthrough solutions.

IT strategy is majorly driven by business goals. Reason of being is that you support your business imperatives of tomorrow with IT of tomorrow. Innovations will feed your IT strategy. It will become a means to reach your goals.

Technological innovation must go hand in hand with business innovations since technology is an enabler to achieve better business results and client satisfaction. Therefore, it's important to have the following elements when defining an innovation vision: 1) Business innovation goals and outcomes: what innovations will help the organization keep or gain a competitive advantage and achieve better results? 2) Tech innovation goals and outcomes: which innovative technologies will help to achieve business goals and improve IT efficiency? 3) Short-, medium-, and long-term visions: it helps teams think of quick wins in the short term without losing the long-term vision.

A tecnologia desempenha um papel crucial como meio na implementa??o de inova??es, por isso, certificar de que a estratégia de TI esteja alinhada com os objetivos de inova??o, fará com que você tenha um aproveitamento do máximo de potencial tecnológico oferecido para alcan?ar os objetivos, além disso, enriquecerá e fortalecerá toda a jornada de inova??o.

KPIs alone won't help in getting the firm stand up and move towards an innovative culture, because the outcome of any innovation needs to have a substantial business impact, where the organization is able to generate revenue from the innovation and extensive KPIs might be needed to measure those at individual level. To improve the innovation performance, firms must promote intrapreneurship and fund such programs, so that employees can own and drive such initiatives which can then become main stream research and lead to great product or services.

I recommend to use simple OKR methodology. Define KPI which you can discuss every few months in your teams. Simplistic approaches are best for acceptance.

Estabelecer métricas claras para avaliar o sucesso das suas iniciativas de inova??o considero mais importante do que simplesmente apresentar um número (kpi). Isso permite identificar áreas de melhoria e ajustar estratégias conforme necessário para obter melhores resultados, e isso é importante na agilidade que a inova??o exige das empresas.

Establish a creative vision. Foster an innovative culture. Allocate resources for projects. Promote diversity of perspectives. Encourage risk-taking and learning. Empower employees with autonomy. Implement idea management systems. Collaborate with external partners. Embrace agile methodologies. Lead by example and measure progress.

If you are really looking for a turnaround or a big push, it is inevitable to bring in people with an outside perspective and give them room to implement new ideas quickly. It doesn't have to be super results, but people in your company will see that there is a clear will for new approaches. Not all, but many of your employees will see this as motivation to move forward.

1. Innovation needs more than just good talk: it needs incubation (Business Alignment, Culture for Change and Adoption, Technology Support, and Financial Backup) to initiate, sustain and scale. 2. Innovation is about invigorating healthy competition within the enterprise: with multiple teams vying for seed capital. May the best ideas win. 3. Innovation is about establishing multi speed IT teams with improvised delivery models and performance metrics (including personal KPIs), to reward outcomes. 4. Innovation is more about starting small: and then scaling-up as per defined roadmap and business case. 5. Lastly, Innovation is about shelving ideas which are not working as per business case: so that the same capital can seed other ideas.

Be an innovation role model as leader. Learn yourself when you expect your team to learn. People will adopt what they like and admire. Leadership today is created by the followership you create.

Envolver os funcionários, promover uma cultura de experimenta??o, ou buscar parcerias externas para impulsionar a inova??o cada vez mais no DNA dos colaboradores é algo a considerar.