Drawing a connection between innovation and workplace purpose often eludes companies looking to hire the best people for their teams. Let’s take a look at what needs to happen to make this possible.
Real innovation will starts with your company culture. Your shared values will help your business grow while stale company culture can sink you entirely. Your company culture can change in subtle ways over time but there are many ways to keep your infrastructure on task and in line with your overall mission. Simply stated, a good company culture drives innovation.
Science has caused controversy for centuries. But scientific developments, such as addressing climate change, applications of biotechnology, and the use of stem cells or GM crops, and the resulting debates are becoming ever more central to our national economies and global wellbeing. Influencing those debates is, as a result, becoming more important to those on all sides of the arguments and those debates becoming ever more polarised; and protests increasingly violent. The greater part of the problem may not be public understanding of science, but rhetoric and values. Managing the emotional debate may be critical to future policy development and science based industries.
As innovation becomes a prevalent activity in organizations is it time to rethink how we approach the culture of innovative people? Deborah Mills-Scofield who previously worked with Bell Labs and now consults on innovations practice, argues we need a return to timeless values if we are going to make innovation sustainable.
Seth Godin recently published a blog post about a concept called "idea tourism." In it, he warns that we can't just be spectators when we come in contact with big ideas that could potentially transform our businesses. Rather than superfically reading about this big idea, I decided to dig deeper into it, to understand what it really means to you and I.
Looking back through history, innovation has often occured when one big thinker envisioned a new way to solve a customer's problem in an elegant way. A case in point: mail delivery.
"Why" is the fundamental question every business leader should be able to answer, immediately, with absolute clarity. Without knowing why a company exists and the purpose of the business, the people who work for an organization cannot align their own, individual beliefs and values with their leaders in order to create the future.
We learn when we play as children, in fact this accounts for most of our early learning. Play acts as a learning laboratory for trying out different internal models on an external world. This is not dissimilar to our traditional brainstorming sessions.
