Creating a Culture of Innovation in Corporates

Creating a Culture of Innovation in Corporates

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In the late nineties, many businesses enforced stringent policies against Internet usage at work.

But as time wore on, the same businesses began to realise that the Internet actually helped employees to work faster and collaborate better.

Imagine being a business of that time and granting Internet access to all your employees – this chance on change very likely meant that that business was miles ahead of its competitors.

Being averse to change and holding steadfast to a “we’ve-always-done-it-this-way” attitude means that very few new ideas are born. That’s part of the reason why corporates are facing an innovation problem.

Collaborating outside your circle

By taking a closed-off approach to adopting new technologies, most businesses of the late nineties pretended that nothing had changed and continued to work in rigid siloes, despite the fact that all signs indicated that the Internet fostered collaboration and productivity.

However, we can no longer remain buried in our respective sandboxes. The Internet opened the floodgates of collaboration but businesses of today need to take it a step further by actively participating in a “mixing of minds”. This means recognising that there are smart people inside and outside your companies, and start-ups and smaller businesses testing interesting things – collaborating with them will boost innovation across the board, turning the business into a more efficient beast.

Taking a lean approach

Corporates aren’t typically considered to be hotbeds of innovation. There are entrenched structures and layers of internal bureaucracies within these organisations that stifle innovative ideas before they even have the chance to flourish.

On the other hand, start-ups are synonymous with innovation. These smaller, more agile counterparts are nimble and embrace the reality that the only constant is change. They take a ‘lean’ approach to doing business, prioritising ideas, validating them as quickly and efficiently as possible, and adjusting their strategy as they grow. This focus on validation is a direct result of battling the realities of the start-up world where there may only have six to nine months to go from idea to market entry.

Corporates can partner with start-up accelerator programs – such as muru-D, backed by Telstra – that encourages corporations to learn ‘lean’ behaviour and use it to their strengths. They can take a leaf out of the start-up playbook by failing fast, testing quickly and making rapid changes based on their learnings. The number of failed ideas may increase but so do the opportunities for game-changing wins.

Don’t think for your customers, know them

Some corporates are guilty of putting the customer second. Instead of thinking that this product or service is what the customer wants, businesses should collaborate with their customers to know their pain points and their needs. Like start-ups, they can pare back their customer touch points and create a better, more cohesive brand experience – in turn, they can collect rich data from fewer touch points and use that to inform innovative product or service iterations.

Real innovation comes from knowing your customer – the end user – like the back of your hand, and then shaping your offering to suit them.

In order to thrive in today’s lightning-fast, ever-changing world, corporates need to take a long look in the mirror and change their way of doing things. While this is easier said than done, time’s running out as more and more start-ups go on to become giants in their own right, taking advantage of their lean methodologies to eventually compete with corporates.

Innovation is taught as part of the Strategy Courses launched at AGSM.

Learn more > https://www.business.unsw.edu.au/agsm/short-courses/strategy-change-innovation

 

 

Australian Graduate School of Management
About the Author
Australian Graduate School of Management

The Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM) offers top-tier general management, executive and leadership development programs. Part of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Business School, AGSM’s MBA and MBA (Executive) programs consistently rank among the world’s top 100 and our online MBAX program ranks #8 in the world, as featured in the Financial Times (UK) 2018 Online MBA Rankings. The school has an alumni network in 83 countries, welcomes students from over 20 countries to its programs, and facilitates international experiences in over 31 partner institutions, making it the top choice for students globally to invest in their education.

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