There are common challenges in the quest for delivering innovative strategies and developing a world class creative capability.
After experiencing the creative industry in many different types of organisations, roles and decision making levels, I have found common opportunities for the innovation teams.
One of these opportunities is the ability to keep the most creative and curious people in the organisation when Innovation is not the value proposition.
Innovation is a career choice
Creatives love to Innovate – To dive in the problem space, understand people’s needs, and experiment with different ideas to solve the problem.
Many creatives hold formal qualifications, making their thinking process easier. Challenging themselves, feeling comfortable with ambiguity is their bread and butter.
Others break into a creative career path at different stages of their professional development, and excelling due to their passion for the discipline, or simply because they have the right mindset for the problem they are solving – technical skills are learnable at any time.
Although businesses can provide great culture, corporate benefits and stability for people that want to make a long term career in the organisations, it’s important to recognise that for a curious mind, that wont be enough.
How to retain your Innovators?
1. Provide a meaningful direction
Although the business direction might not align with innovation and creativity, as a leader you can still provide an environment where the creatives in your team feel that there is an innovative direction in what they do.
There is always room for improvement in all that we do, and it is critical to prioritise opportunities to explore solutions.
2. Reinforce perception of ownership
Delegate the task of exploring solutions for any opportunity for improvement you identify.
As leader, you must let a creative talent to find their own path in their exploration.
Coaching and enabling with frameworks and guidelines are always welcome, but you will fail in retaining an innovator if you micro-manage them.
3. Embrace failure as the status quo
Not all the solutions you explore will land on a brilliant strategy, service or product. But we must try unexplored options if we want to do something new.
Removing the fear of failure and enabling the sense of confidence by breaking the tasks in small chunks will keep most of the risks under control.
Your strategy will play out differently, depending on the value proposition of your organisation and the way of working.
The key to overcome these challenges lays in understanding the organisation’s way of working, and defining a specific way to operate as an innovation team.
It is ultimately in the best interest of the organisation to keep in-house the people that are looking at the future. Their curiosity is as important as their loyalty.
Do you need help retaining your Innovators?
Let’s brood together a solution that will help your creative team to succeed in delivering great strategies and developing a world class capability.
Our latest thinking
Why Customer Journey Map and Service Blueprint Are Not Working For You
A Bottom-Up approach to digital transformation starts from understanding the human expectations, motivations and concerns regarding their interaction with technology. “How” we dive deep to uncover the interactions between human behaviours and technology, and what is produced as an output[…]
Your most important technology problem is not software or data… it’s the people
It’s still common to see organisations struggling with delivering technology that supports their business strategy, because they are only focusing on what software solution to buy, or how to integrate data. The missing piece is the understanding of the people[…]
What are the skills that your team needs to deliver Human-Centred digital solutions?
The questions that leaders and organisations should be asking themselves are: what is the next innovation opportunity and are we prepared for it?