Every year, IdeaScale asks our customers what their main priorities are for the coming year, and without fail one of the top two priorities is to create a culture of innovation. Every innovation thought leader, every organizational engagement specialist, every pundit or leader in transformation says that this is the secret to avoiding disruption.
The circumstances of 2020 have seen businesses push to increased virtual communication and online offerings. How do you compete in this new attention economy, especially with so much noise?
Learn four essential tips that employers and HR departments should consider when trying to get honest input from their employees.
Great leaders intuitively know how to listen. They use empathy and mindfulness to be present during every interaction. Their focus and commitment to the goal let them shelve their egos and receive feedback with grace, inspiring innovation at every level. People who are seen as “born leaders” don’t judge others but learn and grow from what they hear.
No matter what the nature of your business is, you will inevitably encounter unhappy clients. Whether this is because it’s the fault of the company or something that couldn’t have been prevented – your first priority needs to be solving the problem.
Imagine a world where customer service, procurement, marketing, finance, operations, human resources, and sales can truly help each other and work together, instead of stepping on each others’ toes and pointing fingers. A world where all parts of the organizations work together with a shared sense of purpose, no matter how different their cultures, processes, and systems, have been in the past.
The customer is always right. The timeless aphorism holds truer now than it ever did before, as the customer truly drives the ever-changing trends and shapes the industry, with companies battling each other to stay relevant in the hearts and minds of their devoted audience.
As part of today’s changing technological landscape, it is vital to create a workplace culture that adapts to those changes. Doing so starts with having a comfortable workplace culture to begin with. Making your employees feel at ease in their current working conditions is the basis of creating a workplace that can adapt to changes.
Innovative and forward-thinking companies are successful because they have new, exciting, and useful products or services before others and consumers take notice of companies regularly producing the next big thing. These companies are more effective and they can grow more rapidly because their company culture encourages innovation among their employees. A company of “intrapreneurs” can quickly become a successful and noteworthy company.
It is important for any group or organization to have one or more strong leaders. To be a leader, it is critical that an individual has charisma as it will increase the odds that others will follow their words and believe in their ideas. However, charisma is not the only thing that an individual needs to be a good leader. What are some other qualities that are just as important?
Want to improve your leadership skills? Well, you can start by talking less and listening more. While your oratory skills may impress some, your ability to listen will impress even more. Great leaders understand the importance of surrendering the floor. Unfortunately, most leaders choose to dominate the conversation with rhetoric and fail to engage in proper communication, which requires listening.
Before investing in your company’s innovation development, it’s important to develop a strategy for collecting and evaluating ideas. Having guidelines in place to thoroughly vet ideas, value diverse opinions, prioritize scalable and sustainable results, and other areas of innovation management can set you up for success over the long term.
Many executives talk a lot about innovation, but they don't really know how to make it happen. A corporate innovation team asks themselves: How do we "educate" our executives on innovation management and develop stronger corporate innovation capabilities together?
Your greatest innovation opportunity may be right in front of you. The problem is you don’t see it. Every day for the last decade of your life this problem has annoyed and frustrated you. Its solution is worth billions of dollars and would open up a totally new market. The problem is, like the millions of other people who have this problem, you don’t think of it as a problem anymore. You’ve been desensitized. You’ve lost your ability to innovate because of something called habituation.
In many organizations, leaders complain that their employees aren't creative. But employees complain that they are micromanaged and not empowered to try out new ideas. Who's really at fault here?
