Lead Innovative Thinking and Practice in Organizations

This document discusses the different ways to help employees generate ideas, innovation drivers and enablers, and strategies to make innovation an integral part of organizational activity. It also talks about the barriers to innovation and how to overcome them. The subject is leadership and innovation in organizations. The course code and college/university are not mentioned.

Lead Innovative thinking and Practice

Activity 1- context, tools and strategy
1) There are many ways to help the employees of the organization to generate ideas like
SCRAMMER, Brainstorming, Mind mapping, Visualization and visual prompts, story
boarding, attribute listing, forced relationship, morphological analysis, reverse
thinking, day dreaming, forced relationship etc. In our case the most suitable
procedures will brainstorming, the employees will bring creativity and innovation in
their thinking and mind mapping tools will also be used in the given case. The process
of brainstorming fits appropriately to the model of the company’s policy where the all
employees are allowed to put their view forward. Visual Eg: The process of
brainstorming in done to innovate the sales procedure like planning the session,
communicating with the retailer and distributors about the problems they are facing,
gathering detailed information about how the product is performing in the market and
ideas and views are put forward. (Dunne, 2018)
2) The brainstorming technique is used to nurture the brain of the employees to bring
innovation in their work, the brain storming activities show some trends which are
signs of shaping up organization’s current and future thinking practices. They are
 Rethinking work- Now-a-days, all the companies are involved in diversified
projects not will all its employees to get out of the boundaries of his desk and
explore the world to built ideas and bring innovation.
 Collaboration- The influential leaders must induce the concept of
collaboration of the company with its employees. It will create a win-win
situation
 Flexibility- It was found in a research that 78% people are unable to maintain
work life and family life balance. They fail to make meet deadlines at work
and also commitments made to family members. Making flexible shifts will
help the employees to keep a balance in their life.
 Employee experience- In the era of digitalization, the employees have the
power to give review about the work culture of their organization based of job
satisfaction, salaries, openness of managers. So employee’s experience is one

of the most important thing that organization should concentrate on. (Gallo,
2018)
3) The way of bringing innovations to the products of the organization is well structured.
3M believes in sharing ideas, utilize 15 percent of the time to bring up innovative
ideas. The brain of the employees is nurtured in different ways to bring out innovative
results. And they are inspired to work in team. This is the most important thing which
an employee requires to bring growth in the organization. The technology is shared
all across the company. The patent of the new product and technology belongs to the
company only (Yang, 2018).
4) Specific condition for innovation: Open Innovation and innovation ecosystem, here
the innovation is driven by interacting with others and creating network.
Issues that impact on individual and collective innovative thinking and creativity in
regard to producing a new product : Work Environment
Innovation drivers and enablers: Innovation Cubes, which uses three pairs of
attributes, they are ‘Plain pleasure attribute’, ‘Price shift’, ‘Market shifts-Technology
discontinuity’. The Plain Pleasure attribute mainly points the reasons that why would
people ask for innovation, Market shift-technology attribute which says that whenever
a new technology is developed, a new opportunity of innovation is created. The third
attribute says that the innovation should affordable so that it is accepted by all (Gallo,
2018).
Activity 2: Lead Innovative Practices:
There are twelve different leadership styles, they are i) Autocratic (the leader holds all the
power and responsibility), ii) Democratic (all the team members are involved in decision
making process), iii) Strategic (This process refers to the potential of the manager to handle
all the situations strategically), iv) Transformational leadership (the leaders are open to
changes and brings changes in the working process, organization and motive his team mates
for betterment of their work), v) team-leader ship (the leader instructs, guides, and give a
proper direction to the team), vi) cross cultural (the leaders understand how people of
different culture interact with each other and then they pave the way that how will leaders

work in international market), vii) Facilitative (It is a co-creative leadership model where
the leader with his team-mates undergo transformation during the total work process), viii)
Laissez-faire (here, the leader allows the team members to make decisions, the productivity
reduces in this way ), ix) Transactional ( This type of leadership is also called managerial
leadership where the leader supervises, motivates and punishes the team members). I mainly
prefer Transactional Leadership (Dunne, 2018).
Examples:
Bill Gates always used to motivate his employees to work more and produce more output.
Steve Jobs used to make his employees focus on quality and security systems of his products.
Lary Page always motivated everyone to make search engines which will be suitable for all
platforms (Gallo, 2018).
In reference to the context, I will work on mind mapping of the employees and also on brain
storming techniques. This will diversify their thought process and will make their views and
ideas very clear. . (Jaaron and Backhouse, 2018).
To make the process of knowledge sharing, I will arrange regular coffee session where a
casual conversation of the employees of different department will interact. I will also conduct
weekly or monthly a discussion session where the employees will discuss about new
technologies they have learnt, they will give presentations on it. This process will involve
articulation, awareness and access of knowledge. It will be a dialogue session; viewers will
be allowed to ask questions. The person with the best presentation will be rewarded. This is a
way to create a good knowledge sharing session in the office (Chou, 2018).
Innovations are beneficial to run business but, they also bring many risks too. Firstly, The
competition will be easy only when other organizations cannot bring innovations to their
product. Patents are not always sufficient enough to protect research driven innovations. It is
not always guaranteed that innovative products will perform well in the market. If it fails,
then the company will suffer a huge loss. Secondly, there is also the risk of uncertain
commercial return. Most of the research based innovative products are speculative but if not
tested in the market before completely launching it in the market then there is an uncertainly
of return on investment. Again the time taken to develop the product should be within a limit.

Thirdly, to innovate products, a huge investment must be made on the Research and
Development Department which will again lead to a huge risk. The best way to reduce the
risk is to do a market research before starting the work of implementing the idea, if we get a
positive feedback from the market, then only we should go for implementing it. Before its
launch into the market a test marketing should be done (Jaaron and Backhouse, 2018).
Activity 3: Foster, promote and support:
Introduce and promote:
Introduction to the process of innovative practices creative thinking techniques, can be done
in the following ways,
Stress the importance of creativity in business
Make time for new ideas
Cross fertilise
Training process of staff using innovative techniques
Actively solicit creative suggestions
To be supportive
Tolerate mistakes
Acts on idea
Reward creativity
All the above processes will be done to introduce to the employees the new concept of
fostering their brain methods of creative thinking and making them practice innovative
methods at work (Jaaron and Backhouse, 2018).
Establish method to capture, communicate, share idea:

In reference to the given context, to communicate with people I will rather prefer
campaigning in the work place and ask the employees to join the motivational sessions to
make their career grow in a lightning fast speed by bringing creativity in their thought and
bringing innovations in the product design or make, work they do, strategies they develop. It
is to be induced in their mind that the market is fond of innovations. To promote the program
we must also ask the employees to share their own ideas, views and even pros and cons of the
business strategies of the organization. The employees can also be invited by email where the
details of the programs will be given along with the details of benefit they will draw from the
session. It can also be promoted as a chat session rather than a motivational session. The
employees will be asked to give presentations about what they have learned and how can they
apply it. The employees with best presentations and ideas will be rewarded with prestigious
rewards (Jahn and Koller, 2019).
To initiate and foster communication, we can encourage communication from top down
approach (high officials must work initiate the conversation), the employees failing to do
some work due to some issues should not be punished (this is because, employees who are
afraid that they will be punished for failure will not share their ideas), keeping door open
(this means that the management should always be open to talk to all the sub-ordinates and
focus on the problems they are facing), provide opportunities for communication ( the
employees should be included in all discussions regarding the projects, their point of view
and solutions they provide must also be taken into consideration), handle conflict
appropriately (in an organization, there are different kind of people with different point of
view, so there always prevails a chance of conflict between the among the employee (Patel,
2018). It is the duty of the Human Resource department to handle the conflict properly and
must also take care of the fact that no further issues will be raised in the future regarding
that). The team development approaches will be:
Recruiting with care
Agree on goals and targets
Value everyone’s contribution
Develop trust
Empower team members
Resolve conflict within team

Celebrate team success
To foster the workplace culture I will be open to all, I will taken into consideration words and
advices of all my juniors and match them with the target and goals of the organization. I will
then try to motivate them to bring innovations and creativity in their work after understanding
their philosophy (Knackstedt, 2019).
Activity 4: Sustain innovative thinking:
Strategies to make innovation an integral part on organizational activity are:
Establish a clear sense of direction
Open communication
Reduce bureaucracy
Instil a sense of ownership
Make sure recognition and rewards are consistent
A tolerance for risk and failure
Eliminate projects and processes that don’t work
Knowledge transfer refers to sharing
Knowledge transfer is the process by which employees share their knowledge or skills. To
make the employees bring innovation in their work and creativity in their thoughts, sharing of
knowledge and increasing the outlook is very important. Keeping in mind all these factors, I
will suggest to establish a clear sense of direction and open communication and also
eliminate the fear punishment due to failure from the minds of employees. Considering all
these facts we will be able to create a platform for knowledge transfer among the employees
(Knackstedt, 2019).
To monitor the rate of awareness, I will arrange weekly sessions where employees will be
asked to give a small presentation on any new technology they have learned about and how
can it be implemented in future (Patel, 2018).

I will demonstrate the process by making regular reports on each and every employees with
details of areas of improvement and will send them to the employees and seniors as well.
The barriers mostly seen here are lack of public speaking skills which can be sorted out by
making them interact with others specially employees of higher designation.

Reference
Chou, D.C., 2018. Applying design thinking method to social entrepreneurship
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Dunne, D., 2018. Design thinking at work: how innovative organizations are embracing
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Gallo, P.J., Antolin-Lopez, R. and Montiel, I., 2018. Associative Sustainable Business
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Jaaron, A.A. and Backhouse, C.J., 2018. Operationalisation of service innovation: a systems
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Jahn, R. and Koller, H., 2019. Foresight as a facilitator for innovative capability and
organizational adaptability: Insights from a family firm in the HVAC industry. In Futures
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Knackstedt, R., Bräuer, S. and Schoormann, T., 2019. Tool Support for Designing Innovative
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