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Key takeaways:
Grassroots innovation is critical to build a company that stands for thought leadership and breakthrough products.
Organizations must nurture a culture of continuous learning and psychological safety to meet innovation goals.
Some companies are fertile grounds for grassroots innovation while others seem to drive innovation in a top-down manner. Naturally, companies that drive innovation from the grassroots are able to generate and test many more ideas in a low-risk manner, productize a promising minimum viable product (MVP), and gain the first-mover advantage.
According to The Wharton School, research shows that you need at least a hundred raw ideas to have the best opportunity for something really innovative.
Why is it that some companies are able to drive a high level of employee engagement while others wait for the directive to come from the management chain? What is the secret sauce in the culture that drives the energy to ideate and innovate?
Building a culture of learning, calculated risk-taking, and growth
My lessons learned as an intrapreneur in multiple organizations can be distilled into the following ingredients for innovation.
Funding continuous learning: The organization enables a culture of continuous learning through external education programs in addition to internal learning opportunities. Education reimbursement is available for all role-related learning; not only bachelors or masters degree programs, but also reputed short-term certificate programs. For example, Stanford GSB’s year-long Stanford Lead program and Northwestern Kellogg’s the 3-month long Product Strategy program deliver leading edge and rigorous curriculum in a high-touch online learning experience.
It’s ok to have a passion project: There is widespread acceptance and even encouragement of the fact that individuals can contribute part time (20% projects at Google) to other teams’ projects and volunteer externally as long as they continue to perform well at their core job role. For example, if a software engineer also enjoys teaching developers, they could be a presenter for the marketing team’s webinars once a month.
Kudos for the additional contribution: Contributions to passion projects outside the core role are rewarded in performance reviews.
Innovation with rigor: Teams apply design-thinking and other similar frameworks to understand the user, identify a problem, generate ideas, and run a pilot. Key metrics are identified to define what success looks like. Organizational structures tremendously reduce bureaucracy to support incubation and iteration. Based on quantitative and qualitative data, promising ideas are funded to scale effectively.
Psychological safety: When a project doesn’t materialize as expected in spite of the team’s best efforts, leaders don’t penalize or shame the team. Instead, leaders who build highly innovative organizations, ask:
What did we learn from this experience?
What would we do differently if we could start over?
What platform can we leverage to share these lessons learned with the rest of the organization?
Give a shout-out to your team or organization if you have these or other ingredients for innovation! What is important to you to nurture a culture of innovation?
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