A professor gives four great tips for implementing innovation within your organization!
Many companies invest even more in ICT and R & D this year, but the development of social innovation is still lagging behind. How can you organize your organization in such a way that innovation takes place more easily?
In a research into innovation, Henk Volberda, professor of innovation, gives some tips on how to ensure that employees work more towards innovation.
Volberda distinguishes companies from, among other things, the creation of fundamentally new products and services (radical innovation) and the improvement of existing products and services (incremental innovation).
Disruptive innovation is the development of new technologies such as artificial intelligence.
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Have employees work in flexible locations
Greater productivity and higher employee satisfaction can be achieved, among other things, by giving employees flexible working hours. But specifically, flexible work locations also seem to stimulate radical innovation and disruptive innovation. According to Volberda, employees gain more access to new knowledge by working in other locations. For example, employees can become detached from the existing processes within an organization, leaving more room for innovative ideas.
Beware of the flexible shell
A relatively larger number of flex workers (employees who work less than twelve hours a week) ensure that a company can benefit more from outside knowledge, but its own R & D and ICT policy suffers from this.
According to Volberda, this will make it more difficult in the long term to create his own knowledge and to see new developments, but he does have a hard time. More research is needed into the interaction between the flexible shell and the innovation capacity of a company, says Volberda.
Do you have many older employees? Focus on sustainable employability
Organizations that employ employees at multiple locations in the organization (sustainable employability) score significantly higher on various innovation indicators, compared with organizations that do not. But the difference is especially great when the workforce is aging. “Sustainable employability promotes the sharing and dissemination of knowledge, skills and experiences,” says the professor. “As a result, cross-fertilization can take place in order to promote innovation capacity.” By using knowledge, skills and experiences elsewhere in the organization, different knowledge areas become more closely interwoven, which can lead to radical innovation. ”
Work with organizations outside of Europe
Companies that develop many new products or invest in new technologies seem to work together with other organizations from outside Europe.
Professor Volberda retrieves Booking.com and TomTom as companies that have partners all over the world.
“An increasing focus on growth markets outside Europe, more spread of research centers from companies all over the world and the presence of certain specialist knowledge in areas outside Europe contribute to an increased innovation success”, he says. But he also gives a warning.
According to Volberda, it is dangerous for the ‘A (Nu.nl, 2018) country’ if they lean too much on knowledge from abroad. (Nu.nl, 2018)
