Does Your Company Foster a “Culture of Innovation”?

Aug. 31, 2010

Culture of Innovation In the web marketing world, creativity is an essential quality for a compelling, unique and effective marketing initiative. A great example is the recent Old Spice social media campaign where the creators took an already effective strategy (their original TV ad) which had received great feedback, and used it in a new and exciting way by having the actor respond with personalized videos to tweets he received from fans.

This campaign is a definite example of creativity and we’re pretty sure it couldn’t have been developed in a company that doesn’t foster a culture of innovation.

A recent study performed by IBM on 1500 CEOs in 60 different countries found that that most CEOs rated creativity as the number one leadership quality necessary for business success.

While this may not seem like a surprising statement to many of you, it is a very optimistic one for innovative thinkers and thought-leaders. The study found that over 80% of CEOs believe that the business environment is becoming so complex that it is literally impossible to succeed without new ways of thinking and yet less than 50% of the respondents believed that their company’s were prepared to deal effectively with this rising complexity (they didn’t feel that they had the creative competency necessary).

Harvard Business Review wrote a blog post on the study and identified 6 fundamental “moves” that they believe CEOs and business leaders must make to foster cultures of innovation in their organization. These transitional moves are:

Meeting people’s needs. Fulfilling employees’ core needs (physical, emotional, mental spiritual) means that they are less preoccupied with unmet needs, and more able to bring engagement to their work.
Teaching creativity systematically. The post cites several, “well-defined, widely accepted stages of creative thinking,” that can be trained and taught to your employees.
Nurturing passion. Allowing people to take on roles that excite their imagination is a key element in fostering creativity.
Making the work matter. According to the post, “human beings are meaning-making animals.” Essentially, by making your employees’ work stand for something, or “mean” something to them, they are more likely to engage with the work in a motivated, creative way.
Providing the time. Creative thinking often requires un-interrupted time where employees are free to think without the pressure of deadlines and instant answers.
Valuing renewal. Allowing a recovery period for your employees is essential for the mental renewal required for creativity. In other words, ensure that your employees are taking breaks (around every 90 minutes or so) to renew their energy.

We think that these moves are an excellent starting point for creating an innovative culture in companies. In our experience we also think that all these points are often overlooked. We like to think that we foster creativity here at Marqui, but it still surprised us to see that we should be taking a break every 90 minutes to renew our energy and we certainly weren't up to date with the stages of creative thinking either, which were an interesting eye-opener!

Does your organization have an effective culture in place currently or does it still need to implement these transitions to allow for a more creative ecosystem?

Especially in the marketing space where so much that we do on a daily basis is based in creativity, a company that doesn’t innovate won’t be able to grow.

Image by Cayusa on Flickr

Posted by Amberlie Denny at August 31, 2010 8:00 AM