Do you know how to establish viable and feasible innovation strategies for your business? This is a really relevant question considering innovative processes are one of the main secrets of successful companies. The challenge is, many companies do not know how to tap into their internal resources and reach their own audience, many of whom probably have great ideas to share from their front-line experiences.
Despite that, not all innovative ideas might be put into practice. It’s necessary that the ideas proposed are viable and adoptable to the business, before they become real in the first place, therefore learning how to score your ideas so you can see how they align with your business strategies is also key.
Thankfully the answer lies herein. Throughout this article, you will find a step-by-step process that hopefully will help you implement those innovative practices and, consequently generate new and innovative ideas for your business.
What is Necessary to Initiate Viable and Adoptable Innovative Strategies?
Several questions contribute to creating a friendly ecosystem for the emergence of innovative ideas. Among them are the creation of a friendly digital environment, the employee’s social engagement, staff collaboration, promoting the promising ideas and acknowledgement to the ones that were good, but just didn’t make the cut. Lucky for you, we are about to answer those questions in detail.
Creating a Friendly Environment
The first step on defining viable and innovative strategies is the creation of a digital environment that is propitious for implementing innovative ideas and practices in the market.
During the creation of this environment, it is important to stimulate brainstorming, which means the development of new ideas and counting on employees with different profiles (that means valuing diversity on your team relating to role hierarchy). You want this environment to be user-friendly and fun, per se, so that they feel that their creativity is welcome and voluntarily will want to engage.
It also important to stimulate each employee to create new ideas and improve their skills. You can do this through an adoption campaign or training. It’s crucial to ignite excitement and anticipation within your team, therefore through their willing participation, they will also indirectly be prepared to face upcoming market challenges and stay up-to-date with the main trends on their field.
There are technological tools that facilitate the development of a collaborative environment and increases productivity and it is absolutely worth investing in those resources.
Initiating a Campaign
Another important step for establishing or developing adoptable and viable innovative strategies is to create a campaign for ideas by sharing a challenge. Challenges can be anything from trying to solve an internal staff challenge, improve a product or process, or simply to brainstorm on a specific topic.
Now you might be asking yourself: What is the importance of this practice? With the campaign, employees might feel stimulated to give new ideas and they’ll know their thoughts are being listened to. This is one of the factors that most impacts the creation of new ideas.
Engaging Employees
There are no doubt that employee engagement is a relevant factor and it also contributes to emerging new business ideas. There are several motives for this to happen.
As many people are on board to develop new ideas, including employees, betters the chances of your business developing innovative solutions in the market, in a way to meet the needs of your customers. It’s not rocket science to understand that those who are face-to-face with your customers the most, are full of customer feedback and ideas to improve strategies. Now all you need to do is just engage them through a platform that can extract that information from them while also acknowledging their participation.
You can engage employees through an adoption campaign, training, or through incentives. With a campaign, you would essentially advertise internally to your colleagues about the new tool that you are launching and get them excited to use it. When anyone starts something new, their lack of knowledge makes them shy to dive in so this is where training will come into play. Short 30-minute, interactive training sessions with team members will boost their user confidence so that they can dive in proudly. With incentives, when people feel encouraged to engage through rewards, this taps into the group of people who either want to be publicly recognized or they were too shy to come forward in the first place but now have their eye on the prize.
Employee Collaboration
As mentioned, there are technical solutions that facilitate building a collaborative environment and increase productivity inside of a digital context. Through such tools, it’s important to encourage a collaborative and engaging environment within your business, especially now more than ever when companies are transitioning to full-remote workforce.
Employees collaborating together will be more likely to help themselves and help each other by sharing ideas. Also, they tend to feel more connected together through a tool outside of just email correspondence or chats. Through increased collaboration, you will find that employees are more willing to contribute for the development of new ideas inside your company when they see that such ideas might also be deployed on the market.
Promoting Promising Ideas
In an innovative environment it’s natural for new ideas to pop up. Some might be extremely useful, while others not so much. There are still some thoughts that might serve as a base or direction to developing a new innovative product, so even the ones that weren’t as highly scored still may be a stepping stone for another idea.
Quality and quantity are extremely useful in this context. A big number of ideas facilitates the company’s contact with diversity and plurality. Different people with different points of view may contribute in distinct ways to the company’s growth. That is in fact really good, isn’t it? The more diversified users means more ideas from different perspectives, which therefore creates a bigger pot of creative ideas shared.
Given this wide variety of ideas, it’s essential to score and promote to most promising ones and, consequently, put them into practice. That first step is important, because it will help you to verify if the idea shows the expected results and if it is a viable, adoptable and innovative strategy.
Regarding innovative processes, down the line after implementing an idea, check if the results are helping your business to conquer its goals and established objectives. If not, it’s possible to think in different ways or solutions that might reduce losses and make the necessary changes.
Employee Recognition
As new ideas come from people, engagement and recognition is essential to assure positive results no matter how their ideas scored.
There are several ways to implement this practice. One is to create an “Ideation Employee of the Month” board where you can promote the employees that have most contributed with new ideas. That encourages others to want to contribute and increase their participation with their own ideas about creative and innovative processes.
Another valid idea is to reward employees based on a scoring system. To encourage employees to share ideas of substance that will truly contribute to the overall goal, the ideas that are highest scored (can be scored by likes or comments), the highest scoring contributors will win a prize to show that not only are they participating, they are also putting sincere thought into their contributions and take it seriously.
Some examples of prizes are movie tickets, front parking spots, gift cards, etc. Other companies have adopted practices where they share a percentage of the profits gained from those ideas with the creators. The beauty is you can either go as small or big as you want, depending on the urgency and priority of the challenge.
And for the ideas that just didn’t make the cut, be sure to recognize those users for their participation so that they maintain their confidence and are motivated to keep engaging. You always want your employees to know that their idea was heard, even if it wasn’t promoted to the next step.
A Great Solution at No Cost
Teams Ideas is a solution that might help implement innovative and viable strategies for your business through tools and features mentioned throughout this article. Would you like to know this tool and launch your first ideas challenge? Enjoy our first module, IDEATION, 100% for FREE.