Innovation is a necessity at all levels to succeed in a continually-shifting environment. However, the fear of risk often gets in the way of initiative. How to encourage your subordinates to take the leap?
Encourage people to challenge the status quo
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Be willing to challenge your thinking and habits, e.g. Don’t wait for a product to become obsolete before asking people to explore potential new solutions.
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Look for opportunities hidden behind obstacles, e.g. Ask your employees to identify opportunities created by a new competitor.
Facilitate experimentation
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Encourage people to confront their ideas with reality, e.g. Ask them to test prototypes or launch a pilot project rather than refining their proposals indefinitely.
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Consider failure as an integral part of the innovation process and learn from it, e.g. Encourage people to draw relevant lessons from unsatisfactory projects.
Take action
Seek to simplify a market offering or a process (30 min)
Stepping back from our tendency to always improve our offers or our processes is an underestimated source of innovation.
Schedule a quick brainstorming session with your team: should you suppress two-thirds of your product range / of a process steps / of your offer options, which would you remove first? Which would you absolutely keep?
Step back from this intuitive reaction: should you go towards this extreme simplification, how could you still meet the needs? What would you be losing and is it that serious in the face of the benefits of such a measure? What innovative ideas are surfacing?
Perfectionism often prevents us from progressing and innovating.
Choose an ongoing project and decide that exceptionally, you will deliver an imperfect version.
Identify the bare minimum to achieve so that your product or service can be made public, that the process can be implemented or the report be sent. What should this beta version contain at the minimum, to be later improved?
Launch it as soon as this minimum is reached and collect feedback to improve and complete this first version. Then compare it with what you would have launched if you had gone to the full extent of your preparatory works.
Consider your work from a different perspective (10 min)
Change of context, of thinking pattern or of network of relations often enables new ideas to emerge.
During an activity with no direct link to your professional topics of the moment, ask yourself: how could you transpose to your professional context what you are observing? E.g.: entering a store may inspire you for a refitting of your office space, a conference or a documentary on the climate might make you think of a new need in your market, etc.
Share your thinking of the moment with your counterparts and team members and invite them to bounce back on your initial ideas to extrapolate and think further.
Practical Tips
> Best innovation practices that deserve to be challenged
> Avoid the reflexes that prevent innovation in difficult situations
Find out more
> Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation
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