Fostering innovation capabilities in your company or programming requires creating a “growth factory”. In order to do so, you should seek out innovation consulting.
Innovation consultants will design a system of enablers to work together to support innovation. By choosing the right people, innovation consultants will enable processes and metrics to come together, they can innovate, inspire creativity among employees, thus creating long-term competitive advantage. The innovation consultant will evaluate innovation practices and create and measure benchmarks. Then, they will create a mechanism to define and launch growth.
With help from innovation consultants, you will be creating a culture of innovation through skilled collaboration and committed leadership. Your consultant will develop a new generation of innovation leaders, and a system of governance within the company to enable future fast and smart decision-making.
Company Culture
You will want to select innovation consultants who encourage brainstorming methods such as incorporating outside views and considering unconventional viewpoints, which truly reflects the use of imagination. This requires having a work culture where employees are encouraged to take risks, voice their opinions, and politely critique one another. It requires good civil discourse, and an ongoing dialogue. Further, imagination is meant to cultivate open mindedness when considering new concepts by providing enough time for thorough thought and determining the reason behind associative thoughts. Structure brainstorming processes to ensure that divergent ideas converge, so that the new ideas are fully synthesized and incorporated into the collective thinking. Prioritize cooperative, interactive thinking over groupthink. Imaginative thinking is key to brainstorming and considering unprecedented possibilities.
Collaborate While Avoiding Groupthink
Your innovation consultant will help you build a team of experts with in-depth knowledge of the operating environment, the target’s personality, and the style of thinking used. They will ensure that there is openness and a willingness to consider new ideas critically. Innovators must not create an echo chamber, but instead generate original ideas and critique ideas introduced by their colleagues. Critical thinking is key to avoid groupthink, which reduces innovation.
One of the most important aspects of creating an effective innovation capability is increasing openness. Openness is vital to collective intelligence, because it allows different members of the group to voice their own opinions and listen to others. These means that new ideas are not stifled. At the same time, new ideas are not blindly accepted, but debated and considered by each member so as to improve the idea. The collective intelligence of a group improves when members can express a diversity of opinions and contribute different, original ideas and critiques rather than mirroring the same concepts over and over again.
Big tech companies are aware of the stifling effect of groupthink, which is why they create growth factories separate from the day-to-day operations and administration of the company. They don’t want the overall company culture to limit the flow of ideas within the growth factory. Further, dedicating a unit to innovation is helpful because then it can establish its own frameworks for improvement. They don’t want the growth factory to be sunk by the entrenched ways of the corporate system.
Manifesting Results
Innovation consultants will help you create an environment where original thinking is welcomed. We call this model the “growth factory”.
Innovation consultants will create a growth blueprint that details the types of innovation you are pursuing, including goals and guidelines for getting there. They will create systems from the beginning to end, with tangible results, by determining a scale of measurement to evaluate production. They will involve the right people– people with the proper skills and motivation. Good administrative practices should enable this management structure to function.
Innovation thrives through a systems approach because original thinking is not simply discarded after a brief brainstorming session. A formal process provides a good foundation for innovation. The effectiveness of the “growth factory” can be improved over time by measuring the capabilities against benchmarks and considering ways to troubleshoot any problems that arise.
