Top 10 Ways to Foster Employee Innovation

1. Find your venture’s next best-selling product or breakthrough marketing campaign by tapping into your staff’s individual pursuits and passions.

• Half of Google’s new product launches— including Google News and Google Suggest— stem from Google’s 20 percent time policy, which allows engineers to spend one day a week on pet projects and personal pursuits.

2. Make creativity easier for staff with a meeting room that sparks group and individual brainstorming.

• Ford Global Technologies’ Innovation Acceleration Center has several breakout rooms, comfy couches, easels, a kitchen, radio-controlled cars, and a 3-foot Statue of Liberty made of Legos.

3. Don’t stop at just meeting rooms. Get imaginative with workstations so they afford privacy but do not close staff off from one another or stifle collaboration.

• Employees at furniture manufacturing company Herman Miller use cubicles with translucent walls and doors.

4. Get more from your brainstorming sessions by building in time pre- and post- meetings for staff to do research, individual brainstorming, and reflection.

• Staff members at IDEO, an innovative design consulting firm, take field trips to places like hardware stores to prepare and be inspired for design sessions.

5. Free your staff to work in the manner, place, and time they are the most productive and creative.

• Best Buy’s recently-instituted “results-only work environment” policy allows its headquarter employees to set their own work hours and locations.

6. Prolong the life of creativity at your organization by staving off staff burnout.

• Netflix’s policy of providing unlimited vacation days for its salaried employees manages the job, not the hours.

7. Don’t just look within your team for creative brainpower—leverage your larger network by fostering collaboration among staff, partners, and customers.

• BMW posts engineering challenges on its Website for its designers and customers to collaborate on developing various features of future cars.

8. Stay innovation-focused when building your team.

• FedEx looks for “risk taking and courage of conviction,” and Procter & Gamble hires people who show the ability to collaborate, to build an organization, and to mentor and develop others.

9. Harness all of your team’s strengths and bypass bottlenecks by using cross-functional teams to develop innovative ideas.

• Apple “cross-pollinates” by having all departments – design, hardware, software— work on products in parallel.

10. Reward the pursuit of innovation – whether or not it produces any new products.

• Employees at Gore-Tex material manufacturer W.L. Gore & Associates are compensated based on contribution to the company—past and present performance as well as future prospects of “speculative projects.”

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