How to foster a culture of innovation?

Before a new client meeting starts, we often research and come up with new ideas like can we triangulate the nests of Asian hornets using traps that automatically detect them. The first step at Semafind is the ideation stage and it is targeted at brainstorming novel solutions to the problem statements. During the meeting, however, we first like to hear what our clients have to say and often find that they either haven’t thought about innovating or tell us what their competitor is doing. A common symptom is an interest in integrating some AI solution like a chatbot but not sure how or where and it is a priority because marketing demands it.

If you find yourself in a similar situation then these steps might help foster an internal culture of innovation.

Don’t wait, ask!

Someone will come up with an idea and champion it. Or will they? Most people are like electricity and are happy to stay on the path of least resistance. Trying something new, breaking things or asking for help from a firm like Semafind doesn’t necessarily come naturally.

Instead of waiting for new ideas, ask for them. Organise specific meetings where people are encouraged to bring problems and provide a space to discuss them. These “innovation meetings” should be separate from the regular catch ups because they require time to think and impart the core novelty.

Try this: Organise a meeting about a challenge not related to your business such as desalinating sea water to increase clean water supplies. Then encourage people to research and suggest new ideas. The reason it has to be unrelated to your business is to ensure people exercise researching, thinking and creating new ideas. If it is within your domain of expertise, it is unlikely anyone will practise innovating.

Allocate time

If you are waiting for a star employee to try something new over the weekend, you might have to keep waiting. If we don’t allocate time to bolster creative thinking and tinkering, it is unreasonable to expect it to happen on its own. Innovation is unlike evolution which happens in the background, instead it requires time and space.

Allocate time for new things to happen. These could be yearly events such as hackathons or longer brainstorming sessions. We often have to have multiple client meetings before a project is settled upon and those multiple meetings are indeed thanks to our clients allocating time.

Try this: Organise a photo competition with the brief “Captures an element of surprise for our company”. Allow AI generated submissions and reward across several categories such as overall winner, most shocking, most alien etc. The process is about allocating a specific time in the company for people to be creative, see things differently and come together at the end to discuss each others’ work.

Embrace Failure

It is easier said than done because in a business where resources are limited, failure is painted as the unequivocal villain. Well, things fail and failure is a crucial part of innovation. We’re talking about bugs in a new product feature but more so about a new approach not yielding results and looking like a waste of money.

Failures are often seen as a waste of resources but the reality is hindsight plays an important role. When an executive sees the results and some things didn’t work as planned, then it looks bad on them for “gambling”.

See failures as investment in knowledge. Instead of focusing on the negative results, focus on the journey that got you there and what you can learn. Commonly, a method is not what it seems or doesn’t work in your use case. For example, reinforcement learning agents are notorious for getting right in real-world cases because the reward signals are sparse, the training regime doesn’t converge and more. This doesn’t mean you’ve done the wrong thing, rather it means you learned something probably no one else knows.

Try this: Have biweekly Failure Fridays meetings or integrate into your all-hands meetings if you already have them, where people are encouraged to share something that they tried but failed. Limit this to two or three people so it doesn’t inundate the audience.