Why You Should Embed Innovation, Not Isolate It

It is no secret that innovation has become one of the most popular buzzwords among CEOs, entrepreneurs, and top business professionals. As Steve Jobs famously stated, “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower,” and this sentiment has never rung truer. With technology constantly advancing and the rate of change quickening, industries are moving faster than ever before. As a result, it seems only natural that companies would concentrate their efforts on innovation in order to keep pace with these changes.

While it is undeniably true that innovation is key to success in any industry, there is a fundamental problem with the way many companies approach innovation in the workplace. Instead of examining how a culture of innovation can be cultivated and encouraged within an organization, companies often set up separate innovation departments solely dedicated to the pursuit of fleshing out new ideas. In some cases, this even comes with a separate physical space dedicated to exploring unconventional ideas and new opportunities.

"Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower."

In theory, it seems to make perfect sense for companies to set up these kinds of departments. In such spaces, the company’s top creative geniuses have the time and space to pursue their most unorthodox ideas. Perhaps more importantly, they have the freedom to experiment with concepts that would ordinarily be deemed too risky or too costly. 

Of course, the notion that innovation departments are ‘safe’ and isolated spaces detached from a company’s day-to-day operations is precisely the problem. When these innovation departments are separated from a company’s core business goals and not perceived as having a major impact on the overall success or failure of a business, creative thinking inherently becomes isolated and siloed. This means that all the creativity and experimentation is confined to one area and subsequently detached from normal business operations. This causes a divide where creativity flourishes in one space, yet ‘business as usual’ continues to reign supreme when it comes to executing final decisions. In short, innovation becomes the responsibility of only a select few and creative thinking becomes something that is relegated to a single area of the company.

This siloed effect is part of the reason that a case can be made against the formation of distinct innovation departments. Instead, the more appropriate response to a lack of creativity is for companies to embed innovative thinking in their business, not isolate it. Rather than assigning the most creative individuals to a single team, managers should make an effort to assign innovation evangelists to every single department. With innovation top of mind for all employees -- as opposed to just a handful -- creative ideas are far more likely to transition from concept to reality. Moreover, encouraging and rewarding such thinking in all areas of the business can make innovation contagious, thereby creating a self-fulfilling cycle.

So while setting up an innovation department may be the business strategy du jour, in the words of Creative England’s CEO Caroline Norbury, “as soon as you have an innovation department, you're buggered.” In turn, many companies are attempting to remedy the problem by turning to events such as Trend Hunter’s Future Festival, to find out how to embed a culture of innovation in their workplace, rather than isolate it. To attend Future Festival and learn more winning strategies for business innovation, find out when Trend Hunter will be visiting a city near you.