Via the Endless Innovation Blog I’ve found an interesting post about things fostering a culture that supports innovation.
Here are a few strategies suggested by experts to encourage innovation that might surprise you:
- Hire naive misfits who argue with you; encourage failure; avoid letting client input limit your vision; and fully commit to risky ventures.
- Don’t do what the customer wants; do something better.
- Fail often to succeed sooner.
- Applying cross-disciplinary knowledge to help creatively solve [...] problems—and broaden perspectives—is a time-honored strategy.
- Team composition that might lead to the most efficient design process does not necessarily lead to the best design.
- and one thing that has a really close relation to my dissertation:
[Launch] an “Architectural Forum†on the intranet, which will be a “collaborative vehicle for posting questions, comments, techniques, materials issues, and so on, about specific projects to capture a running discourse on various design topics throughout the office. It will be searchable and will contain pertinent solutions and best practices through a firmwide dialogue”.
Credit: maz
If you have a smile on your face after reading these suggestions and think “nice but reality is different”, be aware that innovation is just a part of business. Earning money on the short run is rightly important but it is held dear in daily business anyway. So to my mind it is crucial to put the long-term thoughts from time to time in the spotlight.
