What is Innovation Culture in Organizations? Meaning and Definition!
Innovation culture is the work environment that leaders cultivate in order to nurture unorthodox thinking and its application. Workplaces that foster a culture of innovation generally subscribe to the belief that innovation is not the province of top leadership. But, can come from anyone in the organization. Innovation cultures are the prize by organizations that compete in markets define by the rapid change; maintaining the status quo is insufficient to compete effectively, thus making an innovation culture essential for success.
Innovation cultures often measure employees based on metrics such as value creation (for customers as well as for shareholders) and competitive differentiation. Instead of traditional metrics such as on-time delivery and revenue generation. Companies that foster innovative thinking also encourage discovery and find ways to reward time spent on the research required to generate new products and ideas. A much-cited example of this is Google’s “20% time” policy. Which allows employees to spend one-fifth of their work week on what they want to work on. With the expectation that this discretionary work will result in an “aha” moment.
Understanding Innovation Culture in Organizations
Growth creates a need for structure and discipline, organization changes. Which can strain the culture of creativity that is so vital to future success? To sustain competitive advantage, companies need to institutionalize the innovation process; they need to create an internal environment where creative thinking is central to their values, assumptions, and actions. Characteristics with Factors Influencing of Organizational Climate.
Innovation is the engine of growth. It is also a mindset – meaning it is influencing beliefs, values, and behavior. Company culture, therefore, has a huge influence on innovation, being able to either facilitate it or restrain it. Realizing this, many companies have attempted to put systems and processes in place that encourage an innovation culture. However, while such measures are often viewing as the panacea, they are really just the beginning. To shape a true innovation culture, the top people in a company need to develop a mindful approach. Where their every action and word reflects a real desire to encourage and develop new ideas.
Innovation Culture in IT Organizations
Three ways IT organizations can create an innovation culture is by embracing digital, establishing innovation labs and rewarding discovery.
Embrace digital
Innovation is par for the course with companies that aim to make the shift from traditional to digitalized business processes. Indeed, “going digital” is often the first step toward creating an innovation culture that permeates the workplace, rather than resides solely in IT or other pockets in the enterprise. Examples of digital projects include mobile payment and mobile product recommendations initiatives as well as any real-time network data provisioning. Each requires innovation. Until a few years ago, these projects were impractical and cost-prohibitive.
Establish an innovation lab
Creating an innovation lab serves many purposes, but one happy byproduct of such labs is a renewed collaboration between IT and the business because business innovation is closely tied today to information technologies. A real-world example is the innovation lab at Toyota Financial Services. Vice President and CIO Ron Guerrier started an innovation lab in 2011 for businesspeople to come and kick the tires, so to speak, on new automotive technologies.
Enabling and rewarding experimentation
An innovation culture allows people to experiment. For instance, an IT organization crawling through historical data, with no specific questions in mind. Might turn up findings that were totally unexpected based on correlations in the data. Nascent big data and improved higher-performance analytics engines are making data discovery exercises that were previously too time-consuming or cost-prohibitive for most companies newly practical.
Reference
1. Innovation Culture – http://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/innovation-culture
2. Innovation Culture in Organizations – https://www.mbaknol.com/management-concepts/innovation-culture-in-organizations/
3. Innovation Culture in IT Organizations – http://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/innovation-culture
