There’s a reason that innovation is the buzzword on everyone’s lips. It can make the difference between business success or failure, set what you do apart from your competitors and create new streams of revenue that you haven’t previously considered. Of course most blue chip companies are well aware of this and have dedicated sizable budgets to stimulating innovative new ideas within their sectors – but the great thing about innovation is that it really is open to all. It doesn’t take a chunk of cash, all it needs is the right set-up and a good mindset and you can foster that culture within your company.

Ringfence Some Time

We all have it in us to think creatively about what we could do differently in our working practices or in our relationship with clients. The trouble is, often we get so busy simply doing the day job, that this free thinking gets pushed to the bottom of an ever-growing list of priorities. The trick is to proactively ringfence some time to dedicate to free thinking, for you and for your employees. 3M famously coined the phrase ‘fifteen percent time’ with a policy that allowed their workers to allocate up to that amount of their working week to thinking outside the box. While it doesn’t have to be exactly the same, setting aside a few days in a  month to think separately and collectively can really energise the company and develop some brilliant ideas – whether it’s simply adopting greener practices in manufacturing, finding growth hacks for your website, something technical such as thinking up some new uses for ABS molding, or just a new offer you can give to clients.

Learn To Love Failure

Corporate culture has a tendency to become extremely risk averse and to overdo governance to the point where any failure is impossible. And this is exactly where smaller businesses can have the advantage, as they generally have less entrenched systems, siloed departments with vested interests in maintaining a status quo and less top-heavy layers of management. It’s important to recognise the value of being allowed to fail. In fact, no true innovation ever occurs without some failure along the way. We need to spit out the hundreds of unsuitable ideas in order to find the one that can be developed into something concrete. We need the lessons that things going wrong teach us in order to get it completely right. In a culture of innovation, failure actually becomes something precious and worth celebrating.

Shake It Up

Thinking in a linear way can be your enemy here –  so take the time to consciously shake it up. Perhaps this means a program where employees can rotate between different roles and areas of the business, so that they understand the whole a lot better, and are able to suggest improvements and processes they may never have thought of from a narrower perspective. Or it could be setting up forums for people to come together and discuss things from different perspectives. Diversity of thought is so valuable to a business – when we hire a diverse workforce, they approach things at different angles and that can spark a whole amount of creative solutions.