Why do you need to incentivize innovation?
When it comes to driving growth through innovation, we’ve observed a trend over the last five years of companies investing more effort and resources in organic innovation i.e. innovation that stems from within the company. While M&A and “crowdsourcing” are seen as effective ways of importing fresh talent and new ideas into an organization, a great majority of the companies we talk with still view their own employees as a major source of innovation.
Furthermore, many companies understand that encouraging their employees to be more innovative is one of the best ways to make innovation sustainable – in part, by retaining their brightest talent. However, the bottom line: employees’ buy-in and motivation can be the decisive factor in deciding whether an idea or initiative succeeds or fails.
How do you get staff to move out of their comfort zone when sticking to regular things on one’s plate seems like a safer bet? And when most innovation efforts never see the light of day?
We interviewed multinationals and SMEs which are cross-sector, from finance, healthcare, consumer goods, marketing, agriculture, food, hardware and more. The interviewees themselves came from all reaches of the organizations, including senior management, innovation managers, engineers, marketers, and others.
The one common denominator was: Innovation is important to our organization and we want to see more of it.