Innovation is essential for organizational growth. Therefore, you want to avoid hindering your team’s innovation.
If your team is not reaching your expectations for innovation, you should take steps to uncover and solve the problem. The following suggestions can help.
Discover three ways you could be hindering your team’s innovation and how you can resolve the issues.
Unrealistic Expectations for Innovation
Setting unrealistic expectations for your team’s innovation can cause employees to lose confidence in their abilities and reduce their innovative outputs. For instance, you might overestimate an idea and create an expectation threshold that is challenging to meet. Or, you could under-promise the outcomes to upper management and not gain buy-in and support to develop and implement the idea.
Tips to create realistic expectations for innovation
The following tips can help you set realistic expectations for your team’s innovation:
- Create goals and expected outcomes for the innovation process.
- Gather insight into potential risks and methods to eliminate or minimize them.
- Regularly test your team’s progress and make relevant changes to support development and implementation.
Lack of Collaboration
A lack of internal and external collaboration can block the flow of innovative ideas. For instance, your team might be discouraged from collaborating with other departments or customers to discuss, develop, and implement ideas that could benefit the organization. However, gathering input, perspectives, and approaches from diverse individuals enhances business processes, product and service lines, and other factors that impact the bottom line.
Tips to strengthen collaboration
The following tips can encourage internal and external collaboration to elevate your team’s innovation:
- Ask customers for ideas and constructive feedback to enhance your products or services. Then, let your team develop and implement the ideas with the greatest potential to add value.
- Incentivize your team to collaborate with other departments to develop and implement marketable ideas.
- Encourage internal collaboration to evaluate, eliminate, or minimize potential risks associated with an idea to enhance the execution phase.
Ineffective Key Performance Indicators for Innovation
Using the wrong key performance indicators (KPIs) ineffectively measures innovation. For instance, measuring sales volume or revenue might not provide insight into the impact of innovation on the organization. The inability to measure and manage innovation can waste time, money, effort, and other resources.
Tips to choose relevant KPIs to measure innovation
The following tips can effectively measure KPIs for your team’s innovation:
- Include results-based metrics focused on products and conditions for success, such as strategy, structures, capabilities, and culture.
- Group together similar measures, merge output and input data, and classify related factors.
- Use an innovation dashboard to create reports based on integrated data sources and KPIs.
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