Building Conversations Create Innovative Ideas
We all want to get employees excited about innovation, especially when changes are something they themselves helped create. They want to talk about it, and they should! And we should help, so that excitement builds across the organization and spills over to your customers and to the world.
So what’s the best way to help them have those conversations? I recently spotted a case study over on Fast Company, in which researchers studied innovation efforts at Red Hat, Rite-Solutions, KBS+, and Boston Children’s Hospital,T found three factors that led to conversational success:
- Provide a strong vision, but not the solutions.Management offers overall strategy guidance or poses specific problems to be addressed, but lets employees drum up ideas, both individually and in teams.
- Offer structured forums for discussions. To ensure that good ideas are spotted and developed, companies create discussion frameworks, such as innovation days and challenges.
- Empower employees who step up to affect change. Management takes on the role of keeping the conversation going by offering employees guidance, mentoring, and resources. They make sure employee ideas aren’t shut down by others and that employees who fail aren’t penalized.
Read the resulting strategy here: