Thriving innovation culture supports effective change throughout the organization

Innovation is important for any organization, whether it’s a business, government entity, not-for-profit, or college or university. It’s the difference between being wildly successful and just surviving. Innovation looks very different based on what type of entity you are, what is occurring in your marketplace, where you are operating, and who you're competing against.

Baker Tilly senior manager Claudio Garcia, at a Baker Tilly webinar, highlighted four key aspects of innovative cultures:

• Innovation drives value to the market and helps organizations focus on what needs to change to continuously provide that value. Markets don’t stand still; constituent needs constantly evolve. Therefore, organizations can’t stand still, either.
• Innovation should be an expected part of an organization's culture and empower people throughout the organization, coupled with specific incentives for recognizing innovative thoughts and decision-making.
• Accepting failure as a possibility is essential. Many organizations don't communicate well that it's OK to fail, and that failure often is a step toward meaningful change.
• Both big “I” innovation and little “I” innovation are encouraged; anything (within reasonable boundaries) that enhances value or improves organizational efficiency, effectiveness or responsiveness should be welcome.

Smith noted familiar innovations, like Uber, DoorDash, Tesla and Volt, all revolutionized by doing things specifically in response to changing customer needs. She said, “Some emerging innovations across industries served by Baker Tilly include esports, digital textbooks, healthcare self-service and robotic process automation. All spring from a customer need perspective, and that perspective should drive innovative organizations to manage talent, design processes and report results.”

The speakers highlighted three fundamental innovation success drivers and specific capabilities that are necessary for an organization to truly support an innovative culture :

People

As part of the “people” success driver, Smith said that organizations with a culture of innovation should consider both external innovation (serving customers or constituents) but also internal innovation (streamlining processes or providing the right tools or training). Organizations also need to learn how to “fail forward,” where managers or employees are not penalized for ideas that don’t work, but given the time to understand why something failed and then recalibrating as necessary. Organizations should create an award system for innovation that is fair and transparent across all levels of the organization.