There are many reasons to innovate and there are numerous ways to nurture creativity for achieving desired results and amplify collective human impact.
Being innovative is a state of mind. The most important capability of the innovative mind is the willingness and ability to explore new lenses to understand things differently for solving problems in alternative ways.
Innovation & novelty: Innovation is an exploration, production, adoption, assimilation, and exploitation of value-added novelty in business and social spheres. Creativity is a cognitive process with the ability of divergent thinking, a novelty-seeking behavior, and a “putting together” convergence scenario. Innovation is a process to transform novel ideas for achieving commercial value as “intentional novelty bringing sustainable benefit.”
A highly innovative organization is the one in which creativity is a significant part of business and novelty is injected into the culture of the organization, enabling business professionals to break down thinking ceilings or management bottlenecks, overcome conventional practices, spark novelty, exercise their talent, unlock their performance and potential, streamline idea flow and catalyze innovation. As a matter of fact, digital organizations will be organized as an organic system which is self-discovering, self-renewing, generates patterns, structures, innovative activities, and above all, creates novelty over time.
Innovation & incentives: Innovation often implies high return, high risks. The best leaders know what their people need and when they need it. The incentives will increase the willingness of employees to share ideas, break down conventional wisdom, initiate continuous dialogues to solve problems innovatively. Regular feedback is a must and incentives should be comparable to expectations set and engage more people as advocates in building the creative momentum.
If everyone understands the part they play in nurturing an innovative organization, and they are provided the right kind of incentives, in most cases, people will do the right things, set metrics and checkpoints, ensure proper innovation management with the right speed. Customers also play an important role in innovation management. Many organizations are incentivizing their customers in the form of lucrative discounts and freebies to fill in the feedback, which can truly help you improve innovation effort to delight customers.
Innovation & learning: Creativity is an innate process to generate fresh ideas. Can creativity be taught; how can today’s education system produce more innovators? Education should promote creative thinking, and creativity can be nurtured by an open working environment in which people learn to think interdisciplinarily, generate fresh ideas, implement life changes with the positive attitude, encourage and reward “creative thinking, solve all kinds of problems in alternative ways. Let creativity run wild, with a clearly defined end goal.
In today’s fast-changing digital era with “VUCA” normality, formal education alone is not sufficient to build innovative capabilities such as creative thinking, or innovative problem-solving. Therefore, it creates an innovation gap when we are moving to the deep digital reality with abundant information. The goal of creative learning and education is to inspire and develop creativity in a structural way and teach techniques to play creativity oddballs skillfully. Modern educators are like skillful craftsmen and engineers to shape creative talent; they are also like dedicated gardeners, to discover innovative ways to educate, nurture creativity and keep them growing and mature.
There are many reasons to innovate and there are numerous ways to nurture creativity for achieving desired results and amplify collective human impact. It is a strategic imperative to develop the organizational level innovation competency by tapping organizational potential to innovate, investing in the cultivation of capability and capacity for innovation, developing innovation leadership, nurturing a culture of creativity, to lead a more advanced society.
