Strategies for Sustaining An Innovation Program Over Time

1. Promote Accessible Innovation

Corporate innovation can only be sustained if you gain a company-wide buy-in. For starters, building a culture of innovation and encouraging more employees to become innovators ensures that innovative efforts and the volume of submitted  ideas will increase. Crucially, making innovation accessible to all employees, regardless of position or innovative expertise - as Implenia did using KICKBOX Intrapreneurship - also ensures that ideas come from all directions and perspectives. 

When combined with the fact that a team of innovators will inspire and motivate each other, you can ensure that innovation becomes embedded within the company's DNA.

2. Remove Bureaucracy

If you are eager to promote lasting innovation, it’s imperative that you tear down any barriers that could cause innovators to become disengaged. Bureaucracy and stringent top-down approaches, prevent employees from freely submitting their ideas since it can bode an environment where failure is penalized. Employees who believe their ideas will be killed before they've even had a chance to go out and validate them by gathering real customer feedback and insights, are likely to simply stop innovating or showing any enthusiasm towards innovative practices. 

Allowing employees to take ownership of their ideas by removing the need for endless approvals and permission will ensure that there is creative freedom. Additionally, it can remove delays in the process. 

3. Create Psychological Safety

In addition to giving employees a voice, businesses must let them fail as a part of the process. Creativity requires energy, peace of mind, and perspective but that is very hard to find when the fear of failure looms overhead. Besides, innovation is often an iterative process, which is why the right mindset must be established.

As long as employees learn from their failures, these will provide valuable steps on the path to success. So, analyzing failures rather than simply abandoning them is also vital.

4. Expand Your Ecosystem

To ensure an innovation program is sustainable, it relies heavily on the constant inflow of new ideas from different departments. Expanding this to include ideas and input from customers or other stakeholders as well, can enhance this process. It may even lead to entirely new innovations or help an employee along in unlocking their next great idea.

5. Give Clear Direction

It’s far easier for employees to innovate when they understand the overarching objectives and goals. When employees comprehend the broader context and strategic direction of their organization, they can better align their innovative ideas with the overall mission, ensuring relevance and purpose in their endeavors. 

When it comes to an idea or innovation, there are different factors to take into consideration when evaluating it. Contextuality emphasizes the importance of considering market conditions, industry trends, and the competitive landscape. Viability and feasibility play a crucial role in assessing the potential for success and practicality of implementation of the idea or innovation. A customer-centric approach focusing on desirability ensures innovations resonate with the target audience. 

An innovation program should focus on providing a clear framework to help employees assess their ideas with these factors in mind. rready's flagship product, KICKBOX Intrapreneurship, has multiple tools, including the innovation guide for intrapreneurs, to aid in this, allowing employees to focus on continuously refining and improving their ideas and concepts. By utilizing provided templates and real-world insights, intrapreneurs can focus on developing and growing their concepts.

With product development, revenue growth, and improved customer experiences as driving forces, a well-structured innovation program can flourish, fostering a culture of creativity and problem-solving among the employees and driving continuous progress and positive outcomes. 

6. Reward Innovation

Finally, employees need a reason to keep innovating. While intrinsic motivation does play a key role, organizations should implement reward systems for innovators. Here, KICKBOX Intrapreneurship offers innovation leaders the opportunity to record all steps on the path to innovation, allowing companies to recognize all successes rather than only the people that found a moonshot idea.

Where recognition and credit is given, employees will continue to innovate and embrace opportunities to contribute.  This helps to cultivate an innovation culture in the company and ultimately improve the overall sustainability of innovation programs. 

To build an innovation program that lasts, requires an interplay of different strategies and approaches. An organization might not reap the benefits of all of the above-mentioned strategies where an innovation culture is not present and where employees do not feel empowered to contribute to company-wide innovation, be it due to a lack of support or no access to the right tooling. Hence, investing into an innovation management program that can address all of these aspects simultaneously, is crucial to ensure successful innovation in the long-run.