In the previous post we talked about tips on how to improve the structures of work teams in a company to promote plural innovation spaces and how to allow workers to be the driving force of your innovation ecosystem.

In this second part we want to provide you with 5 tips to promote the culture of innovation focused on the management of work teams.

1. Be Transparent About Your Challenges

If the challenges and goals of the company are not shared, they will lead us to a situation where the new ideas generated by the work teams to innovate will not fit with the chosen path. In addition, they will not feed back on each other when they are not coordinated.

Being transparent about what you need to improve as a company will help everyone move in the same direction, looking for solutions to the same problems.

2. Admit (and learn from) your failures

Sharing the failure cases is as important as sharing the company’s success stories. Understanding where we were wrong and letting the new additions to the company know it will allow us to find ideas, motivations or thought processes to really introduce innovation in your company.

3. Take advantage of open innovation

A typical mistake many executives make is to focus on cultivating innovation solely within the company. This narrow mindedness excludes the great minds that exist outside of your organization. To avoid this mistake, take advantage of open innovation.

Open innovation is a process that allows companies to find solutions to their most difficult problems by obtaining input from outside the organization. The open innovation model continues to grow and will be essential when designing our strategies. If you are looking for articles on this topic we recommend this article by Henry Chesbrough.

4. Accept failure and make it the norm

It is inevitable that innovation carries the risk of failure. For every successful example of world-changing innovation, there are many failed ideas.

The reaction to this fact cannot be to try to run away from it, but we must accept it and learn to live with it as a characteristic of the sector. We must acknowledge the possibility of failure, de-dramatize it, and encourage risky initiatives to help employees approach innovation in a more open and inventive way. Failure is necessary because it leads to learning, adaptation and new concepts and models. The vast majority of innovations are the result of previous failures.

5. Participate in an innovation hub

Innovation Hubs are spaces where company representatives meet and share approaches to innovation. Having grown in popularity over the last decade, there are now hundreds of these centers around the world.

The Innovation Hub concept recognizes the importance of a multidisciplinary approach to innovation and shows the importance of collaboration in problem solving.

In our context we have available the European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIHs). Take a look at innovation hubs near you and think about how you and your teams can get involved.

This type of practice to make better business decisions is no longer seen as unique to companies specializing in R+D+i, but increasingly SMEs are interested, which by fostering a culture of innovation make it possible to make the most of the knowledge accumulated in the company.

At Macrotest we use these ideas to improve day by day in our organization. In our R+D+i projects division, we seek to help companies develop their innovation projects with organizational improvements, search for financing and sharing our “know-how” thanks to our experience..

We are available to solve all your R&D&i project needs!