4 Tips For Building a Culture of Innovation

Innovation doesn't happen by accident. It emerges from a bullpen of great ideas, enlightened trial and error and iterative product development. . .but it starts with great ideas.

Great ideas are a byproduct of a creative culture. There is no magic wand to transform a culture, but there are some principles we've adopted that have helped attract and inspire smart, creative people. Here are four principles that have worked for us that might help you plant the seeds for a culture of innovation in your organization:

1) Servant Leadership

The foundation of any creative environment is inspiration. Inspiration is derived from a culture that promotes each individual's capacity to succeed, and recognizes their contribution to the organization as a whole. In our company, we refer to this principle as "Serve People First". This principle was built on the Agile tenant of Servant Leadership. Servant Leadership is about empowering those around you, encouraging their ideas and building upon them. One of the ways we encourage peer empowerment is through our weekly Awesomeness Award. This is a peer nominated award where anyone in the firm can nominate anyone else for something "awesome" they did. Each week, all nominations are sent to the entire firm and the winner gets to claim the "Awe-ffice" for the week (pic above). Who picks the winner for the week? Last week's winner. There is zero executive involvement.

For more tips and to continue the conversation, join my webinar on May 27th

2) Go Broad To Go Narrow

I first learned this phrase from the guys over at Intuit. "Go broad to go narrow" means, in order to find one great idea, you need to generate a lot of bad ideas to put in the funnel. I always tell folks I'm a big fan of bad ideas and stupid questions, because that's where the magic hides. We've worked hard at creating a culture where people feel safe sharing their ideas and are encouraged to do so. To set the stage for this, on an employee's first day they build a lego diorama representing themselves, to be displayed at the entrance to the office. For many, legos are our first introduction into the world of design and engineering (i.e. what we do). Legos encourage the creative spirit at Solstice, and the silliest dioramas generate the most attention, as do the silliest ideas.

3) Tear Down The Walls

I respect that there are a lot of differing opinions on this; but I'm a huge believer in open space formats and I'm not a big fan of people working from home. Being co-located without walls encourages communication, collaboration and ideation. I see it in practice everyday. Many people walk through our office and comment, "I can feel the energy here." We also have a creed that we will attempt face-to-face communication over a phone call; phone call over IM/text and IM/text over email. Email is asynchronous and just slows everything down. If you want to innovate, you need to move fast. Open spaces encourage speed.

4) Freedom

In order to keep people engaged and fresh, it's important they have an outlet to work on their own passion. Google explored this with their infamous 20% time, but that model's not economically feasible for most organizations. As an alternative, twice a year we have Express Day. Express Day is a 24 hour innovation hackathon where the whole firm (operations included) gets to work on whatever idea they choose. In the weeks leading up to Express Day, project teams self-normalize around employees' best ideas. Teams announce their project goal at 3:00 PM on Thursday and present their work to a panel of external industry judges at 3:00 on Friday. The winning team gets bragging rights and their names engraved on a gaudy, awesome, 6-foot plastic trophy.

Express Day is expensive, especially for a services organization like ours, but we have quantifiably gotten our return every time we've had it. The return takes the form of new product offerings, new ideas for our client projects and most importantly, increased morale. Between Express Days employees can continue to work on any Express Day initiatives while getting paid overtime for their efforts.

By building a culture of innovation you can harness not just a few, but all of the creative minds in your organization. These are a few tactics we've employed, and I'll share some more examples at my webinar on May 27th. In the meantime, use the comments below to share what successful tactics your organization has employed to encourage innovation.

-J