5 ways to optimize creating innovators

The best way to encourage innovation is to establish a culture that enables free thinking and inspires new ideas. The innovations with the most success are usually recombinations of old ideas rather than build from scratch. The more knowledge your employees have and the more freedom they have to combine these pieces of wisdom will make your company more innovative.

#1 Have a free book scheme

A free book scheme is not really expensive if you limit it to one or two books a week for each employee . If they read more I would be impressed. This will put you back roughly 240 USD/€ a year per employee who claims. (which not everybody does)

For me personally this was the perk i liked most when joining Hubspot and let us be honest, it is a perk that is easily understood in comparison to all of the tax evasion and share programs which usually create more questions than value add when rolled out to a larger audience. (I exclude everyone here who really gets shares as a form of payment, which is usually higher up the ranks).

If you analyse the book purchasing patterns of your employees you will also know who:

1. Continuously learns based on intrinsic motivation

2. What are they interested in and where they want to go with their career

3. Combined with a platform to share knowledge, like a wiki, who is willing and able to share their knowledge in a coherent manner

In short you can identify easier and quicker where the leadership potential for your company is currently situated, which ones of your current managers keep their knowledge up to date and who needs help in their development (people who are reading a lot into different topics, rather than focusing).

As an employee, if used wisely, a free book scheme is the perfect opportunity to build relevant knowledge to grow your career and get new ideas. For me personally this translated into reading 2 books a month about sales and marketing. The knowledge gathered from that I shared here on LinkedIN in my posts. If you compare the version of me with the version half a year ago, who basically knew next to nothing about modern marketing (my university knowledge did not really apply to my current job). This is a leap which comes in handy to amp up the efficiency and effectiveness of my sales calls.

#2 Decentralise authority

For this point i would like to compare what I know about virgin and apple, because they are very alike in some areas, but very different on the point of how they handle authority. The points I make are majorly based on the books "losing my virginity" and Steve Jobs biography by walter Isaacson. I do not account for changes which might have been made under the leadership of Timothy Cook who took over from Steve Jobs at Apple as I lack the books to base my observations on.

Virgin and Apple are similar as they are well established brands who disrupted markets (Aviation, Music, Trains in Virgins case; Phones, PCs, Mp3 players in Apple's case). Both companies have/had charismatic leaders to represent themselves in public (Richard Branson / Steve Jobs) and are active in high tech (even though nowadays a case could be made that there is no industry which does not use high tech to achieve their goals).

Where they are fundamentally different for me is how they approached organisational structure and decision making. Where Steve Jobs put himself at the centre of product development and micromanaged his products to the extent that simple but necessary features had to be implemented without his knowledge, Richard Branson build a company with many subdivisions with their own expertise and leadership which are part of the bigger virgin brand ecosystem.

The apple approach created successes in mass markets with a few highly and strictly designed products with huge impact. A great case study in focus. Virgin shows a great example in how to diversify and spread risk. Apple got higher yield from their strategy, but also bet the entire company several times on just one product and was therefore exposed to more risk.

If you want to create a sustainable, long term strategy of innovation for your company i would personally lean more towards the virgin approach for following reasons:

1. Innovation includes inevitably failures, virgins approach seems to be better at compensating for those by not having "all eggs in one basket"

2. Virgins approach leaves more room for surprise innovations and quick adaption on many levels as authority and communication ways are shorter

3. I am personally convinced that less eyebrows will be raised about Virgin's future when Richard Branson steps down as it was the case when Timothy Cook took over at Apple.

You don't learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.- Richard Branson

#3 Nurture a culture of self improvement

Always ask yourself and your employees what they could have done better with positive feedback loops based on agreed, trackable measurements.

Ask the sales team who hit their number if they are happy with the handovers to the services team or if they could have improved those to drive higher customer satisfaction.

Ask the services team who fulfilled their service levels if they could have done better in informing sales about sales opportunities in existing accounts.

Ask the marketing team who hit their lead goals what they could have done to make these leads convert into customers at an even higher rate and where they think sales is overlooking some hooks.

Ask the development team who finished their coding in time if they could spend more time investigating the feedback from support and customers on the web and how this would/could have an impact on their coding.

If applied this will increase effectiveness and efficiency and lead to innovation in itself. At Hubspot we found out without hiring an outside consultancy for 100.000 USD that we can expand our blogging efforts into sales and web design reaching audiences which were formerly not in our core strategy. This would not been possible without continuously asking "How can we be even more awesome?".

Whenever an individual or a business decides that success has been attained, progress stops. - Thomas J. Watson

#4 Encourage failing forward

If you establish a culture based on self improvement and decentralised authority it will expose you to the risk of more things going wrong as you get more done in less time.

Especially for junior team members this can be daunting and potentially risky as their form of "Use good judgment" might be different from the good judgment of someone who is a lot more experienced.

My sales manager approached this part of the equation by saying "Pascal, you will mess things up and I want you to mess things up and learn from them" in our very first one on one. This gave me the courage and trust in the organisation to try things out, even if they would be perceived as unconventional and risky in a different setup.

So far it seems to work for me and Hubspot in terms of numbers produced.

If you want innovators who take a risk and create new markets for you they will go into unknown territory. If failure will stigmatise you as incompetent and push you to the outskirts of the organisation your company will have less and less people thinking out of the box over time.

If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate. - Thomas J. Watson

#5 Trust your employees to be responsible

Timothy Ferris makes an interesting observation in his book "The four hour work week". He realised to run a business and invest minimal time in it he had to remove himself as a bottleneck for decisions.

He started off with deciding and looking at every single customer reclamation himself which lead to a backlog in customer complaints and more time spent and revenue lost to the point where he was working full time just to handle complaints of others. His problem was that he was reluctant to empower his employees to make decisions involving spending money to solve those complaints. Everything which had a budget attached to it went to his desk. He doubted that the people he outsourced some of the work to would be capable of handling the requests in a responsible manner and was horrified at the idea of giving them access to his own money.

After a while he got so overworked that he came near to burn out. He then decided to empower his employees to make decisions costing up to 100USD around customer complaints for themselves. He was in for a surprise as overall cost went down and he had more time for himself to spent on vacation or thinking about his business in a strategic way.

This approach was so successful that he even extended the limit on which employees could make decisions for themselves to solve a problem.

If you want innovators you might want to think about empowering them and trusting in their good judgement.

Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

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What would you like to add to my observations of Apple and virgin ?

Would you like a free book scheme at your workplace and how would you justify it ?

Let me know in the comments or sent me a private message

All the best

Pascal