🥣 How can we foster an everyday innovation mindset for people so that it is part of their daily routine?
This article explores the mindsets, attitudes, and behaviors that unleash innovation in the daily routine of individuals, organizations, and teams. Innovation means more than just having the right frameworks, methods, and tools. To bring innovation to life in the everyday world of a person or organization means to foster a culture and set an environment that makes it flourish.
How can we foster an everyday innovation mindset for people so that it is part of their daily routine?
First, we need to understand what concept of innovation we will be talking about. Innovation is crucial to the continuing success of any organization. It’s the rocket fuel that powers the creation of new products, new services, new ways of running your business, or even new ways of doing business.
If innovation had ingredients, they would be: creativity, the capacity to be curious, and other soft skills to complement technical abilities - innovation is a dish seasoned with a whole lot of experimentation and fun.
In order to foster an innovative culture, many companies have started promoting an entrepreneurial mindset within their employees. This mindset requires developing and strengthening soft skills such as agility, adaptability, decision making, among others. These soft skills are what allow us to differentiate ourselves in terms of creativity.
It’s common that employees already come with hard skills, just to give an example: Engineers with procedures, Accountants with numbers and IT with the technical knowledge and coding. But soft skills are more related to emotions and how we interact with others, many times correlated to our attitude and personality. These are much difficult to learn, at least, in a traditional classroom. Soft skills include communication, creative thinking, curiosity and imagination, teamwork, networking, decision making, positivity, time management, motivation, flexibility, problem-solving, critical thinking, and conflict resolution, among others.
We can say that to truly drive innovation, companies must foster and maintain a true innovation culture. A culture in which the top-down structure is gone and it’s replaced by a culture of collaboration, where risk and failure are not avoided but embraced! Where all collaborators are given the opportunity to learn, to contribute, and grow beyond their daily tasks, to put their skills into practice, and where everyone, from C-level managers to interns, is active contributors to the company’s culture. These changes in company culture lead us to understand that companies today need to self-assess. They need to understand their capabilities to improve in order to stay competitive in today’s market. Right now there are some companies that look at this new culture as a challenge, but in reality, they should see it as a great opportunity to innovate. This has become a priority which they are trying to overcome with different initiatives. The most common initiative to foster an innovation culture is training programs that help them adopt different skills commonly used by tech companies and startups, such as agility & adaptability, initiative & entrepreneurship, and curiosity & imagination.
The employee certifications in methodologies like Agile Framework or Leans Start-up, are acquired by companies as part of this transformation process, improving Human Resources’ indicators by having certified workers. However, from the end-user point of view the employees- those traditional training programs are usually perceived as one more mandatory activity they need to complete. Because of this, the expected results for the company do not fully accomplish, and according to the managers and collaborators, their motivation, productivity, and attitude at work after the training programs remain the same. Activities that integrate food and learning are a success at many companies, and for obvious reasons: Food is one of the best ways to attract and encourage employees to participate in training and team-building sessions, without the mandatory calendar appointment. And those sessions are different than the traditional classroom sessions.
Apart from the food being a way to attract employees to these sessions, working with their hands and rolling up their sleeves, will activate their brain to be open to new knowledge and information. Food is also something that brings people together, which is why many times we prefer to chitchat in the kitchen and why many people say “the best conversations happen at the table”. Cooking and eating are definitely great ways to develop and put into practice soft skills. And they are also the answer to the question we had a the beginning of this article: How can we foster an everyday innovation mindset for people that is part of their daily routine? Through Food!
“Food is joyful, it is part of a culture, it brings people together and it is something that you enjoy multiple times throughout the day”