How Can Fostering Innovation Among Employees Transform Your Organization?

Hello all!

I recently read about methods to encourage the workforce at an organization. Can anyone with knowledge in this field shed some light on how developing a culture of innovation among the employees will impact my organization?

The heading of your post should have been "Impact of Culture of Innovation on the Organisation" OR "Impact of Innovative Employees on the Organisation" and not "employee's impact on the organization."

A culture of innovation is always important for the organization. US MNCs like Apple, Google, or 3M thrived because they fostered a culture of innovation. However, fostering a culture of innovation begins from the top. What if the top leadership is weary of experimenting with something new? What if they are shy of spending on R&D of any kind? What if the top leadership prefers competitors creating something new and allowing them to take the first-mover advantage?

To foster a culture of innovation, first, you need to measure process cycle time and your various spend categories. Your innovative practices should reduce either the cycle time of some process or some cost. Generating new ideas is not easy. To generate new ideas, employees should be prepared mentally. For this, their job knowledge and motivation also matter. Therefore, your second task is to train your employees on how to be innovative. The third task is to record information in a very organized manner as to what was increased or decreased because of the innovative ideas generated from the employees. It should be part of your induction training.

My Experience at Cement Plant in North Karnataka:

Once I conducted a brainstorming session for the engineers of a prominent cement plant in North Karnataka on energy conservation. It is the 10th energy-efficient plant in India. In the last five years, energy-saving or otherwise, about 1,000 process improvement ideas have been implemented in this plant. Against this backdrop, generating ideas on energy conservation was a tougher task. However, my facilitation opened the floodgate of ideas. I had conducted the session in two batches. The following statistics are quite revealing:

a) Batch I

Total participants: 49

Total Number of ideas generated: 300

Innovative ideas: 19

b) Batch II

Total participants: 39

Total Number of ideas generated: 99

Innovative ideas: 17

At the end of the session, participants openly acknowledged that they could not have generated such a huge number of ideas on their own. Because of the entire exercise, the CEO immediately estimated that they can save the power bill roughly by 2-3%. Talk to your management, and if you wish to hire my services for innovative practices, I will help you.

Thanks,

Dinesh Divekar

I agree with the fact that mental agility and job knowledge of the employees are very important for the culture to expand. But how is this correlated to reducing either the cycle time of a process or the cost? Could you explain that point.

I believe that cultural innovation is key to participation, and you can read about it in this really cool article I came across - "Effective Ways to Revive Talent Management in Asia."