1. Remove the Fear of Failure
People regularly state that peace of mind and perspective are necessary for innovation. Research shows that 79% of C-suite executives say their organizations are tolerant of failure. Creating a culture where employees see failure as a step towards success is crucial. This culture should encourage employees to embrace failure rather than fear it. the biggest asset for innovation
2. Remove the Fear of Ridicule
Gaining acceptance with failure is not the only way to achieve psychological safety. Managers also need to ensure that they do not ridicule employees for a bad idea. When an employee benefits from this, their performance will improve by up to 500%, which naturally leads to greater levels of innovation. More ideas is sure to translate to more winning concepts.
3. Give Employees Time and Autonomy
An employee can only work on their ideas if you let them. Atlassian allows employees 24 hours to work on anything they want. As well as giving them time to work on ideas while they’re fresh, you must let them experiment with autonomy. A bureaucratic approach will sadly kill any creativity because they’ll feel untrusted and unable to let concepts evolve.
4. Promote Innovation for All
When you want employee creativity to shine through as a key part of the company’s DNA, understanding the types of creativity and showing encouragement to employees from diverse backgrounds—culturally and positionally—is essential. A company-wide approach to innovation will statistically yield more ideas. Not least because intrapreneurs will spur each other on.
5. Empower Employees With the Right Tools
No-code tools help employees develop ideas quickly, whether by working together or using data to test products. Siemens Energy is a great example of how KICKBOX can unlock an employee’s full potential at an early stage. As well as letting employees innovate, the right tech keeps them engaged in the process.
6. Let Employees Know the Expectations
While you must give employees the freedom to work on innovations, they still need some guidance. A deeper understanding of the company’s objectives equips them with the ability to consider contextuality and desirability. Appreciating that incremental innovation can be as effective as radical innovation will also help intrapreneurs rethink their ideas.
7. Focus on Joining the Dots
Connecting the dots is a phrase that means intrapreneurs must make links between questions, problems, and ideas, tapping into various types of innovation to identify innovative solutions. The future's most successful companies will use new technologies and data-driven innovation. Collect and visualize more data in prototyping phases to guide their next steps.
8. Celebrate Successes
Empowering employees to innovate once is one thing, but success isn’t driven by a single idea. Cultivating a culture where all innovations (not just the groundbreaking ones) are rewarded will build a culture where idea generation flows naturally.
Unlocking employee creativity can be difficult and in order to succeed, the right tools and frameworks are required. Innovation management tools can help to provide the necessary structure for the process of idea creation, validation and execution, and make the innovation process accessible, enabling employees to submit their ideas freely.
The KICKBOX Intrapreneurship program is a powerful tool to help promote innovation across the company. Through gamified tools and an easy-to-use innovation platform, employees are empowered to submit their ideas and take ownership in seeing these through the innovaiton process. To find out more, arrange a demo now.
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