Unlocking Creativity: Innovation Spaces for Intrapreneurship

The Right Surroundings Actively Encourage Innovation

All employees are influenced by their physical surroundings. As such, well-designed innovation spaces can support creativity and productivity. For starters, simply removing employees from the spaces where they complete their standard tasks can help them be more creative and innovative. 

Providing innovation spaces for employees to actively work on their ideas is a surefire way to boost intrapreneurship and encourage a culture of innovation.

Making Time for Intrapreneurship

Flexibility can play a big role in promoting intrapreneurship. Evolving workplaces play a key role in the process of fostering an adaptive corporate culture that promotes innovation.

When you have dedicated rooms or spaces that employees can work from when creativity strikes, there is a clear sign that you want employees to innovate. When this flexibility is combined with the freedom to innovate at any time, rather than within set timeframes, the potential for success increases even further.

Innovation Spaces Take Collaboration to the Next Level

Collaboration underpins open innovation in the modern era. It is now necessary to collaborate with multiple departments, as well as external stakeholders, including other companies and the customers themselves. Programs like KICKBOX Intrapreneurship, can help organizations deliver customer-focused innovation through collaborative processes. Even with digital tools that support innovation with real-time insights among team members, face-to-face interactions and collaboration remain vital.

Open innovation spaces create this dialogue, which can help motivate employees. Such spaces may include brainstorming areas, maker spaces, co-working spaces, and innovation labs, and they provide a safe and supportive atmosphere where employees and other stakeholders can engage in open dialogue and exchange ideas freely, without fear of criticism or judgment. 

Innovation Spaces Can Help Prevent Burnout

Aside from the challenges from a mindset perspective, trying to shoehorn a few minutes of innovation into the standard working day can cause burnout. The strong links between physical burnout and reduced innovation have been statistically shown to support anecdotal suggestions. The short walk to a different part of the building and being in a completely different space to where you normally get your work done, can go a long way in providing a physical and mental reset. This can ultimately lead to improved innovation performance through more creativity.

In addition to supporting innovation, this may translate to improved results in a wide range of additional daily business matters as well.

Dedicated Spaces for Intrapreneurs Remove the  Fear of Failure

The majority of innovations will fail. However, innovation spaces can foster a sense of psychological safety if employees feel reassured that any ideas generated in these spaces will not be judged. In turn, this encourages them to be creative without limitations, especially when a culture of learning from past failures has been cultivated. It will also promote company-wide innovation.

While intrapreneurship should never be limited to innovation spaces, these dedicated areas have the potential of forming the foundation for building a better innovation culture. By providing a physical environment specifically designed to inspire and nurture creative thinking, these spaces serve as a catalyst for employees to explore new ideas freely, and experiment without the constraints of their usual work settings.