Innovation is Easy

It's making it a part of your overall business strategy that's tough. I have been reading a lot lately about innovation and the companies that excel at it and several things keep coming up over and over again. Recently, I decided to do a little mind mapping and see if I could diagram all of the components that make innovation happen (when I get it a little cleaner I'll share it with everyone). In doing this exercise, and combining it with my ongoing research, I came up with a few constants that innovative organizations have in place in order to make it part of their overall strategy. In no particular order they are:

Leadership - This is a huge issue with me these days. I find that the companies that have strong, confident and open-minded leaders are some of the most innovative. Great leaders set direction, champion the best ideas, motivate their people and understand that businesses are dynamic almost living organisms that must be nurtured, tended and cared for in order to grow.

Trust - Successful innovators are constantly taking risks, not because they are reckless, but because they trust their people to develop innovative ideas that benefit their business. Key to trust is that the leaders trust the people in their organizations and allow them to be creative. That kind of trust can easily pervade an organization. The opposite is also true, if leadership doesn't trust their people, or people don't trust their leaders the organization runs the significant risk of stagnating.

An Inspired Innovation Leader - This is the person who has the latitude to explore and discover, the ability to create virtual teams and the understanding to know what is a truly innovative idea and what is not. The best of these people tend to be great organizational politicians, in order to get an innovation through their organization, but a very unbiased critic when it comes to identifying the best ideas.

I know there are a myriad of other qualities that make innovative organizations and most are unique to a particular company or culture, but these three seem to come up over and over again. Make no mistake, there are numerous routes to incorporating innovation as part of an overall business strategy and, as I mentioned earlier, when I get my mind map cleaned up I'll share it, but if you're looking to improve the innovation quotient in your organization, these three areas are probably good places to start.