Innovation in the workplace: best practices to structure your approach

Many organizations associate innovation with occasional inspiration or a line item in the R&D budget. In practice, innovation that produces lasting results has less to do with inspiration than with three organized habits: consistent market watch, a genuine ability to experiment, and a project portfolio that is actively managed rather than simply endured.

The pillars of a structured innovation approach

Best practices to get started, even without a dedicated team

1. Formalize regular, even limited, time dedicated to market watch, rather than leaving it to individual goodwill.
2. Choose a small number of experiments at a time, rather than spreading effort across too many ideas at once.
3. Define simple criteria to stop an experiment that is not producing convincing results.
4. Document the lessons learned from each experiment, including the ones that fail.

Common mistakes

• Treating innovation as a topic reserved for an R&D team isolated from the rest of the organization.
• Launching many innovative projects without ever prioritizing or stopping them.
• Never capitalizing on past experiments, whether they succeeded or failed.

The opposite risk exists too, sometimes called innovation theater: hackathons, walls of sticky notes and ambitious speeches, with no project surviving past its initial pitch. A mature innovation approach is not measured by the number of ideas launched or the staging around them, but by the organization's ability to evaluate them, prioritize them and learn from them, including when they fail.