What's your strategy for mentoring innovation?

1 Define innovation goals

Before you can mentor innovation, you need to have a clear vision of what innovation means for your organization and your team. What are the specific challenges or opportunities that you want to address with innovation? What are the expected outcomes and impacts of innovation? How will you measure and reward innovation? By defining these goals, you can align your mentoring efforts with the strategic direction and priorities of your organization, and communicate them clearly to your mentees.

2 Encourage diversity and collaboration

One of the key drivers of innovation is diversity, both in terms of perspectives and skills. As a mentor, you can promote diversity and collaboration by creating a safe and inclusive environment for your mentees, where they can share their ideas, opinions, and feedback without fear of judgment or criticism. You can also encourage them to seek out different sources of inspiration and information, such as other teams, departments, customers, or external partners. By exposing them to different viewpoints and experiences, you can help them broaden their horizons and spark new insights.

3 Provide guidance and support

Another important role of a mentor is to provide guidance and support to your mentees, especially when they face challenges or uncertainties in their innovation journey. You can help them by asking open-ended and probing questions, such as "What are you trying to achieve?", "What are the assumptions behind your idea?", "How can you test your idea?", or "What are the potential risks and benefits of your idea?". These questions can help them clarify their thinking, refine their ideas, and overcome obstacles. You can also provide them with constructive feedback, resources, tools, and connections that can help them advance their innovation projects.

4 Foster experimentation and learning

Innovation is not a linear or predictable process, but rather a dynamic and iterative one. As a mentor, you can foster a mindset of experimentation and learning among your mentees, by encouraging them to try out different ideas, methods, and solutions, and to learn from their successes and failures. You can also help them adopt a prototyping approach, where they create low-fidelity versions of their ideas and test them with real users or stakeholders, to gather feedback and validate their assumptions. By doing so, you can help them reduce risks, costs, and time, and improve their innovation outcomes.

5 Celebrate and share innovation

Finally, as a mentor, you can celebrate and share innovation with your mentees, by recognizing and rewarding their efforts, achievements, and learnings. You can also help them showcase their innovation projects to a wider audience, such as other teams, leaders, customers, or media, to generate interest, support, and recognition. By celebrating and sharing innovation, you can boost your mentees' motivation, confidence, and reputation, and create a positive cycle of innovation within your organization.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?