Why Traditional Innovation Stifles Employee Creativity

Innovation has evolved from a traditional product-centric focus to a modern, holistic approach. Traditional innovation often fixates on product development, thereby sidelining customer-centricity, resulting in limited results. Moreover, it tends to restrict innovation to select teams, stifling the creative potential of the entire organization.

In contrast, modern innovation embraces a holistic view, prioritizing customer-centric ideas and inclusivity. It encourages a company-wide approach, enriching the creative process with diverse perspectives. Most importantly, it fosters psychological safety, empowering all employees to participate, cultivating a culture where everyone becomes an intrapreneur. This shift in mindset is the key to revitalizing your corporate innovation strategy and driving success.

An innovation strategy needs to truly ignite employee creativity while simultaneously leading the company to a greater strike rate of successful ideas. Here’s why your traditional approach isn’t working and what can be done to get things back on track.

Traditional innovation is product-driven

The traditional approach to innovation is heavily product-focused. While products still play an integral role, successful innovation often revolves around customer-centric ideas. Customer insights help ensure that concepts are contextualized by feasibility and desirability, thus allowing organizations to select the best ideas time and time again. Conversely, when key performance indicators (KPIs) are solely focused on research and development (R&D), it will lead to limited results.

For employees to feel truly engaged, they need to know who they are innovating for. This makes it far easier for them to determine whether an innovation is one that will generate success or not.

Traditional innovation puts obstacles in the way

Under traditional methods, innovation is limited to a select few innovators. Tools like rready's flagship product, the KICKBOX program, encourage company-wide innovation that involves everyone. Intrapreneurs will no longer feel the need to take their ideas through several superiors before having them truly heard. This enables the organization to benefit from having diverse perspectives, which is further supported by the customer insights of a client-centric approach. This can be particularly useful for incremental innovations. 

More importantly, a modern approach creates psychological safety. When employees can work on ideas without the fear of failure or ridicule, they’ll be focused solely on the potential possibilities. This mindset shift will translate to increased creativity.

Traditional innovation is too slow

Aside from the delays caused by the barriers mentioned above, traditional innovation is slow moving. At least in comparison to what the most innovative companies are doing. More than 30% of organizations expect AI to be among the areas of innovation with the highest impact on their businesses over the coming years. Corporate innovation strategies that truly embrace modern tech will spark employee creativity. For starters, they will have the freedom of mind to think clearly when developing ideas.

Furthermore, employees will be able to see innovations progress at a rapid rate. Even when iterative efforts are needed, seeing an idea move in the right direction will keep employees engaged. It additionally opens the door to continued evolution.

Traditional innovation fails to incentivize and reward success

A company-wide approach to innovation will statistically yield more ideas. However, employees will only innovate if they have a reason to do it. While traditional strategies tend to give all the credit to the C-level exec, employee innovation platforms like KICKBOX celebrate all steps on the road to success. This includes failures that provided valuable lessons along the way. By providing acknowledgement of all parties, employees will feel more valued and engaged.

Modern approaches to corporate innovation also introduce collaborative efforts as well as healthy competition. Meanwhile, the freedom to work on ideas while they’re fresh is another major advantage.

Modernize your corporate innovation strategy with KICKBOX

As the advice above shows, a modern approach to innovation largely revolves around a change of mindset. Nonetheless, supporting your employees with the tools needed to create is equally crucial. KICKBOX puts the sense of control in their hands while using various frameworks to help ideas evolve organically.