Why is innovation by management important?– Key competencies every manager must have.
Causes of “innovation” death
Innovation needs to by managed by competent people – it is a proactive process of solution orientation not a reactive process of chance.
Innovation is essential to all areas of management and business. It almost always dies a natural death in organisations. By “natural” we mean that its death is a normal part of a progression of events in organisational life. This is not necessarily the inevitable outcome, but it is by far the most common.
Growth tends to kill innovation simply because the elephant cannot move as quickly as the rabbit. There are several specific changes that typically, although not always, take place as an organisation gets large.
Here are some of them:
Things slow down– It takes longer to get anything accomplished because more and more people are involved. Innovation requires results, not just ideas.
The passive veto– As the organisation gets larger and more organised, more people have a “no-go” power, and fewer have real “go” power. The culture tends to impose sanctions on mavericks.
Cross cancellation– In the large organisation, two or more departments or groups may be competing with one another trying to gain more influential roles. There is less sharing of ideas, less support for innovative approaches and more preoccupation with who is right and who is wrong.
Nobody in charge– As an organisation grows it becomes more difficult for the CEO to give personal and intellectual leadership to the others.
What stifles an innovative culture
Over the years our focus at Corporate Learning Solutions has been on understanding how individual motivators and fear factors plus the complexity of team dynamics has a direct impact of creating and stifling an innovative organisation. This also includes developing effective and workplace systems, which support innovative projects, strategies and initiatives. It is critical that the innovative manager consistently communicates, demonstrates and supports the organisational goals, roles, processes to gain momentum to dramatically reduce costs and maximise profits and margins.
These specific skills sets impact on how managers behave in the business world and often hinder an individual, team or organisational performance because more time and effort is allocated to focussing on the problem as opposed to being solution oriented.
What is the best strategy in order to gain commitment and support for innovation within your organisation ?
To develop and innovative organisation you will need to:
Develop a clarity innovative vision
Innovation initiatives that are clearly scoped with objectives
The development a target-list of innovation ideas
Gain and maintain a high level of commitment
Develop interesting and challenging jobs / initiatives
Develop a culture of innovation flexibility
Create open lines of communication will reduce the amount of conflict
Co-ordination of management teams to be involved as early as possible
Innovative organisations will require innovative managers who maintain innovative internal cultures, which invite innovative behaviour from individuals and groups
By developing essential skills, an effective manager of innovation is able to achieve outstanding results within a short time-frame by getting results with and through people. These essential skillsets include strategies around
Motivation
Strategy
Projects
Performance
Teams
Individuals
Change
Networking
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