What factors shape a culture of innovation? | Dan Seewald | Big Think

The culture of innovation in an organization is a byproduct. It’s a dependent variable. You have to build other factors in order to create and shape your culture of innovation.

Let me give you a couple of thoughts around this. First of all, if you want to have a meaningful culture of innovation, you have to have a really bold and aspirational innovation purpose. So, as an organization, what is their purpose that goes beyond just “we’re going to make more money, we’re going to be the leader, we’re going to help our customers”? That’s all well and good. Those are goals, but your purpose should be something that’s authentic, that’s bold, and that people can personally connect and relate to.

When you have that, that inspires people to give a little bit more, to take risks. When people are afraid to take risks, when they are really reluctant to do things differently, then you really don’t have a strong innovation purpose, and the culture in your organization will not incubate new and fresh ideas.

There are a couple of other things I think are really important. The idea of building an innovation brand. Now, as a marketer, one of the things that I felt very strongly about when I built an innovation culture at a large organization was that we often thought about it as a program. But programs live very short lives. On average, they live about two to two-and-a-half years. But brands live on much longer. It’s because they have a promise. They have an identity.

Brands are the things that live on when you put the investment in of building it, of making people kind of relate and connect to it. So if you want to change a game, you have to invest in building an innovation brand, not just an innovation culture or even your innovation purpose. Something that will stand the test of time, that people will think about, they’ll connect to emotionally.

And at the end of the day, it’s something that they themselves feel that they have a relationship with. When you build a brand, that’s when companies, that’s when the people in the organization will go the extra mile. When people will work on weekends, do things at night, they’ll stay late at work, it’s because they feel that the work they’re doing is meaningful and purposeful.

And when you have a brand that conveys that, people will go that extra mile. Innovation depends on people doing things differently and taking risks and being willing to go further than they normally would for just the job. You don’t want people to just come to work. You want people to go the extra mile and to feel they’re a part of an organization that’s committed to innovation.