How do you "create" innovation in your Team, Building or organization?

I agree with Paul. Innovation cant survive on its own. It needs attention. People in our teams(keel it small) is easier to focus on and motivate. Usually new team members likes to make an impression by putting up suggestions... This will be your best starting point. Support your team, dnt shoot the ideas down as you will shoot down the person. Push for an investigation and give full and proper feed back, this will show that you care for your team and they will feel appreciated. Reward good suggestions as this contribute to your operations and aspire your people to keep on looking for innovative ways of doing things.

Innovation only comes from the people in your organization. Their culture, their interest, their passion for the job - or for other things in life. The trick is to make sure you can tap into this constant stream for the benefit of your organization and more importantly that you can nurture the best ideas to fruition. 

And that's where most companies and organizations fail miserably: they put up a suggestion box, a few posters, and maybe have a ceremony at the end of the year. 

 

But staff are not easy to fool. Unless they feel that management is truly committed to fostering innovation, your initiative won't survive. 

So my advice is start small, with just your team. Foster a culture of trust and risk taking. And whatever you do, DONT get "out of the way" - get in there and push, push push as hard as you can for those ideas you believe in. 

innovation can be a deliberate and systematic strategy to implement and monitor. You can start small as suggested but you can also roll out a strategy to incorporate all aspects of your business if you have the resources and the mindset to do it.

 

There's a big difference between creativity and innovation, in which the first is new ideas that might surprise and delight you, yet innovation is actually making use of those ideas in a new way. the idea itself can be very new or it can be an old and used idea but the innovation comes in using it in a very new, and surprising way. your innovation can be the product or the service itself you are offering, or the process in which you conduct your business.

If you manage to get the best of the best in your team, and your team is very diverse in its background (both personal AND academic/experience) then you might have an innovative team on your hand but are not used to its full potential. Are you giving them enough challenges to work on? a challenge by difinition is not constant problems to be solved, but interesting new mix of problems that people are actually interested in solving, and they go just a lit bit above their own experiences, so they cannot be easy for them.

 

If your team is truly innovative, and there is criteria for what does that mean, then they might come up with their own challenges or propose development and fixes to your current methods that will truly jump your company into an innovative one.

 

 

good luck.