How to increase the amount of innovation in the company

Increasing the amount of innovations that a company is able to produce is one of the main responsibilities of an innovation department. However, as in any strategic initiative, the first thing that must exist throughout the organization for it to be able to generate more innovations, is the motivation to do so. This motivation is not possible if there is no powerful, insightful and strongly committed leadership from the highest levels of the organization. Since such leadership exists, the key to achieving a substantial increase in the number of innovations produced in a company is to release the creative energies of employees and to introduce appropriate mechanisms to collect, evaluate and channel innovative ideas... A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to participate in a very interesting seminar where the speaker spoke about children, their ability to learn during the first years of life and how that ability is dramatically reduced as the child grows up. Although this was not something new to me since it is part of the theory of my partner at Learningworks, Roger Schank, a true learning guru, the way in which the speaker presented the topic made me think deeply. Before entering school, children learn by the natural method of experimenting, seeing what is happening, establishing conclusions (learning) and moving on. Before going to school, this experimentation process takes place with great freedom and, fundamentally, without major conditions. Schank says...” in their natural state, that is before going to school, children have no motivation problems. Excited to learn, they are eager to try new things and are not aware of failure. We never see a 2-year-old depressed because of how their speaking skills are progressing and so they have decided not to keep progressing... For almost every child, the love of exploration, the enthusiasm to learn something new, the desire for new experiences continues until about 6 years old...” All of this changes as the child grows. First, the mother and/or father begin to reprimand him every time he does something not accepted as adequate social behavior and it is greatly accentuated when he starts going to school. At first the child continues to behave at home, that is, asking questions every time he is curious about something. Suddenly, when all the children make fun of him because he doesn't know and he asked a question, the child begins to associate that asking is bad... and this leads to a radical reduction in his ability to learn. Just as this mechanism is developed in school with children, it also occurs in the company with adults, and it is the main obstacle to overcome continuously and systematically in an organization that seeks to grow strongly through innovation. Therefore, companies that set up innovation systems consisting of encouraging the production of innovative ideas by all people in the organization, should know that the key to a mechanism of this type does not lie in the applications or information systems that collect the ideas, but in a holistic design in which all the focus is placed on maintaining the motivation and enthusiasm of people to participate by contributing ideas. This is particularly important because through our professional experience what we notice is that there is a great anxiety on the part of managers to start implementing information systems for the management of innovative ideas, in the belief that this will solve the company's innovation problem. Unfortunately, there is nothing less certain because an application, which is not integrated into an innovation model that considers the motivation factor as the basis for success, all it can do is lead to failure in a faster and more organized way...