Today, innovation is the key to your company’s success… and its survival

In today’s globalized environment, your company must be constantly innovating. Specifically, your organization must develop new products, new services, and better customer and provider relationships while simultaneously improving efficiency.

If your company fails to innovate, it will be quickly driven out of business by globalized competitors who have access to massive pools of cheap capital or cheap international labor pools. In the toughest circumstances, you will face competition from a competitor who has both. If you only try to improve your existing processes, or slightly tinker with something minor, like your marketing, you will be crushed.

How to turn your company into an innovation machine

The question becomes how to you turn your organization into an innovation machine. This essay will explain that you need to enlist the help of everyone in your organization. Innovation happens in a decentralized, non-hierarchical way. To generate innovation, you will need to create an emergent environment in your company. Emergent environments are self-organizing systems of independent, self-motivated individuals who, collectively, produce predictable and usually optimal results. One example is a collection of self-interested individuals working in a free market economy to create efficient resource and labor allocations. The study of economics can reveal ways to encourage economic growth. In a similar way, the study of emergence and innovation can show you how to turn your knowledge workers into innovation creators, and create an environment that will foster innovation.

Step 1: Eliminate the barriers faced by innovation creators

• Innovation creators need to know who is who
• Innovation creators need to know what is going on
• Innovation creators need to own a piece of the pie
• Innovation creators need an environment of reciprocal altruism – where people trust that they will eventually be rewarded for their efforts
• Innovation creators thrive in an environment that encourages dialog and has true feedback loops
• The organization must be culturally primed to accept constant innovation

Step 2: Design a structured platform to support innovation

Innovation happens most efficiently and most effectively when people can follow a structured process in their pursuit of new solutions. Examples of innovation under a structured process include the US Army, the Financial Derivatives market and the open-source software movement.

Your first practical step – Deploy an enterprise blogging system to facilitate internal communication

Enterprise blogs can be used to create a structured platform that fosters innovation by reducing the internal barriers faced by innovation creators.