Building A Culture Of Innovation

SHORTLISTED: CMI Management Book of the Year 2017 - Innovation and Entrepreneurship Category Being a truly innovative company is more than dreaming up new products and services by external consultants and internal taskforces. Staying one step ahead of the competition requires you to embed innovation into your organizational culture. Innovation needs to be embodied in everything that gets done by everyone who works there. By changing your organizational culture to one that supports Building a Culture of Innovation, you will remove the barriers that stop you responding quickly and agilely to changing market conditions and opportunities for growth. Building a Culture of Innovation presents a practical framework that you can follow to design and embed a culture of innovation in your business.The six-step Innovation Culture Change Framework offers a structured process to make change stick, from assessing your organization's innovation-readiness to leading a managed change process that will foster innovation at each level. It includes case studies from international organizations which have shifted their focus to an innovation culture, including Prudential, Qinetiq, Octopus Investments, Cisco, Siemens, BrightMove Media, Waitrose and Feefo. Supported with downloadable resources, Building a Culture of Innovation is an essential read for business leaders and change implementation teams who want to place innovation at the heart of their business strategy.

Deconstruct the history of patterns of innovation in business and connect them to existing and failed attempts in management consultancies, engineering, web technologies and academic institutions. This book shows you how to create an optimal environment at work for growth and innovation. Many large-scale organizations eventually invest in research and innovation as a dedicated part of their businesses. In doing so, they are faced with two choices: build their own practice of innovation or enact patterns of innovation created before them, ones they perceived as "tried and tested." In this book, you will see how patterns of innovation touch many aspects of a worker’s life: from how their work is presented to others, job titles, working environment, and expectations around output. Every chapter will offer a history of these patterns and examples of how they have succeeded and failed within organizations. What You Will Learn Identify how innovation is named and highlighted in organizations Reveal ways to champion innovation to clients and the outside world, from trade shows and conferences inside the office Uncover ways companies acquire innovation, including incubators or mergers Discover the conditions for innovation to happen every day, including office layouts, time management, communication structures, and expectation management Who This Book Is For Tech start-up/scale-up founders, management consultants, managing directors, innovation managers and heads of R&D, academic researchers, interior designers, and architects

From executives complaining that their teams don’t contribute ideas to employees giving up because their input isn’t valued--company culture is the culprit. Courageous Cultures provides a road map to build a high-performance, high-engagement culture around sharing ideas, solving problems, and rewarding contributions from all levels. Many leaders are convinced they have an open environment that encourages employees to speak up and are shocked when they learn that employees are holding back. Employees have ideas and want to be heard. Leadership wants to hear them. Too often, however, employees and leaders both feel that no one cares about making things better. The disconnect typically only widens over time, with both sides becoming more firmly entrenched in their viewpoints. Becoming a courageous culture means building teams of microinnovators, problem solvers, and customer advocates working together. In our world of rapid change, a courageous culture is your competitive advantage. It ensures that your company is “sticky” for both customers and employees. In Courageous Cultures, you’ll learn practical tools that help you: Learn the difference between microinnovators, problem solvers, and customer advocates and how they work together. See how the latest research conducted by the authors confirms why organizations struggle when it comes to creating strong cultures where employees are encouraged to contribute their best thinking. Learn proven models and tools that leaders can apply throughout all levels of the organization, to reengage and motivate employees. Understand best practices from companies around the world and learn how to apply these strategies and techniques in your own organization. This book provides you with the practical tools to uncover, leverage, and scale the best ideas from every level of your organization.

More than two hundred CEOs reveal their candid insights on how to build and foster a corporate culture that encourages innovation and drives results In Quick and Nimble, Adam Bryant draws on interviews with more than two hundred CEOs to offer business leaders the wisdom and guidance to move an organization faster, to be quick and nimble, and to rekindle the whatever-it-takes collective spark of a start-up workplace, all with the goal of innovating and thriving in a relentlessly challenging global economy. By analyzing the lessons that these leaders have shared in his regular "Corner Office" feature in The New York Times, Bryant has identified the biggest drivers of corporate culture, bringing them to life with real-world examples that reflect this hard-earned wisdom. These men and women—whose ranks include Jeff Weiner of LinkedIn, Tony Hsieh of Zappos, Angie Hicks of Angie's List, Steve Case of Revolution (and formerly AOL), and Amy Gutmann of the University of Pennsylvania—offer useful insights and strategies for creating a corporate culture of innovation and building a high-performing organization that unleashes the passion and energy of its employees. As the world shifts to more of a knowledge economy, the winners will be companies that can attract and retain the best and brightest employees by creating an environment where they can grow, contribute, and feel rewarded. Through the wisdom of these leading chief executives, Quick and Nimble offers a keen understanding of leadership, recruiting, and the forces that shape corporate culture and a clear road map to bring success and energy to any organization.

A practical guide to innovation strategies based on fact, not feeling The Innovation Formula delivers strategies for building a culture where innovation can thrive, based on actual scientific research. Author Amantha Imber holds a PhD in organisational psychology, and has been called upon by a multinational roster of forward-thinking companies—such as Google, Disney, LEGO and Virgin—to improve innovation at all levels. In this book, she shares her strategies and helps you tap into a substantial body of scientific research to help further innovative practice within your own company. For example, rewarding failed innovations can actually be a critical aspect of building an innovation culture. It's rarely done, but it fosters creative thought by signaling to people that failure is tolerated and is a necessary ingredient in the pursuit of innovation. This kind of practical, easily implemented strategy is the lynchpin of cultural change. This guide shares fourteen separate, yet interconnected strategies for improving your company's innovation culture, and provides illustrative examples of real-world companies who are putting these plans into action. Business innovation guides tend to focus on how one company does it. But it's not your company, and just because it worked for Google or Apple doesn't mean that it's right for you. This book is different; these techniques are based on science, not gut feeling, and can apply to any organisation, at any level. Delve into the science behind successful culture shift For best results, reward innovation, whether or not it succeeds Learn the critical elements that foster organisation-wide creativity Implement practical strategies based on evidence, not anecdotes Fostering a culture of innovation means making your company a safe space for new ideas. Over 95% of business leaders surveyed get it wrong, because intuition cannot compete with data. The Innovation Formula gives you a science-based framework for turning your organisation into one where innovation survives and thrives.

This myth-busting book shows large companies can construct a strategy, system, and culture of innovation that creates sustained growth. Every company wants to grow, and the most proven way is through innovation. The conventional wisdom is that only disruptive, nimble startups can innovate; once a business gets bigger and more complex corporate arteriosclerosis sets in. Gary Pisano's remarkable research conducted over three decades, and his extraordinary on-the ground experience with big companies and fast-growing ones that have moved beyond the start-up stage, provides new thinking about how the scale of bigger companies can be leveraged for advantage in innovation. He begins with the simply reality that bigger companies are, well, different. Demanding that they "be like Uber" is no more realistic than commanding your dog to speak French. Bigger companies are complex. They need to sustain revenue streams from existing businesses, and deal with Wall Street's demands. These organizations require a different set of management practices and approaches--a discipline focused on the strategies, systems and culture for taking their companies to the next level. Big can be beautiful, but it requires creative construction by leaders to avoid the creative destruction that is all-too-often the fate of too many.

Why do we forget about people when we talk about innovation? Innovation has been a popular subject for the last years. Bruce Nussbaum, perhaps exaggerating, said “Innovation died in 2008, killed off by overuse, misuse, narrowness, incrementalism and failure to evolve. It was done by CEOs, consultants, marketeers, advertisers and business journalists who degraded and devalued the idea by conflating it with change, technology, design, globalization, trendiness, and anything new. It was done by an obsession with measurement, metrics and maths and a demand for predictability in an unpredictable world.” If so, why another book on innovation? Because it is not one more book on the subject! It is a book that does not talk about innovation, but about people. Is there anything as important as people when innovating? This book describes how to create a true culture of innovation, a culture where innovation is not an objective, but a consequence.

In their first book, Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators, the authors provided a better model for executing disruptive innovation. They laid out a three-part plan for launching high-risk/high-reward innovation efforts: (1) borrow assets from the existing firms, (2) unlearn and unload certain processes and systems that do not serve the new entity, and (3) learn and build all new capabilities and skills. In their study of the Ten Rules in action, Govindarajan and Trimble observed many other kinds of innovation that were less risky but still critical to the company's ongoing success. In case after case, senior executives expected leaders of innovation initiatives to grapple with forces of resistence, namely incentives to keep doing what the company has always done--rather than develop new competence and knowledge. But where to begin? In this book, the authors argue that the most successful everyday innovators break down the process into six manageable steps: 1. Divide the labor 2. Assemble the dedicated team 3. Manage the partnership 4. Formalize the experiment 5. Break down the hypothesis 6. Seek the truth. The Other Side of Innovation codifies this staged approach in a variety of contexts. It delivers a proven step-by-step guide to executing (launching, managing, and measuring) more modest but necessary innovations within large firms without disrupting their bread-and-butter business.