It is widely accepted that diverse groups generate more innovative ideas than homogeneous ones. There is strong agreement that supportive senior leadership is the most important enabler of innovation.
Besides encouraging collaboration and aligning innovation and inclusion efforts, following research by The Conference Board
12 practices:
- Encouraging creativity and innovation as a corporate value or principle;
- Emphasizing inclusion as a corporate value or principle and communicating its strategic importance;
- Developing managers and leaders to promote idea-sharing in teams;
- Offering training to eliminate unconscious bias;
- Establishing systems for employees to submit their product/process ideas or suggestions;
- Creating a culture of innovation by encouraging entrepreneurship and risk taking;
- Ensuring innovation teams are demographically diverse and have diversity of thought;
- Hosting ideation sessions or idea bazaars;
- Encouraging external innovation networks;
- Adopting a user-centric design approach to innovation;
- Using proactive steps to prevent an atmosphere of suppression and fear; and
- Holding all employees accountable for helping to create an inclusive workplace.
The ultimate objective is to boost business performance. Therefore, leaders need to clearly articulate how these practices impact operational outcomes.
By combining human capital, business, sales, and other kinds of data, companies can gain new insights about which of these practices and factors contribute most to specific outcomes, such as speed to market or new revenues, or whether specific kinds of innovation (product, processes, strategy, etc.) benefit from different kinds of diversity.
What is your point of view?
- What about your company-wide capabilities reg. innovation?
- Are inclusion and innovation indeed correlated?
- Which of the above mentioned practices do you use? Why?
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