How Innovation Training Can Transform Your Organization

How to create a culture of innovation? Innovation training is key to successful cultural change. The UNITE Culture Canvas summarizes the most important factors that contribute to an organization’s culture. It helps you understand all aspects of culture and how they interact.

How Innovation Training Can Transform Your Organization

Innovation is a key driver of organizational growth and longevity. By leveraging innovation strategies, businesses can excel in their respective markets. According to McKinsey, a management consulting firm based in the US, the global coronavirus pandemic made innovation more important than ever and the results from McKinsey’s research reveal that 90 percent of businesses fundamentally changed how they operate. Moreover, with these new changes come more opportunities and value creation.

Equally, it is essential to facilitate innovation across different departments and levels of your organization for long-term success. We at Digital Leadership excel in offering specialized Innovation Consulting service that empowers businesses to seize emerging technology opportunities. Crafting tailored strategies, launching innovative ventures, and nurturing positive relationships form the core of our main focus.

The perfect way of achieving this is through innovation training. So, what is innovation training?

What Is Innovation Training?

Innovation training is a course or program that teaches employees and other learners how to use innovative strategies, techniques, and theories. The content and scope of innovation training can vary depending on the business and industry.
One example of innovation training is Disruptive Strategy – a course taught by Harvard Business school in which professor Clayton Christensen teaches participants how to align processes and resources to develop an innovative culture. The course also teaches participants how to access new opportunities, identify potential threats in their industry, and leverage disruption to position their organization for growth.

Why Is Innovation Training Important?

Innovation training is important because it facilitates strategic thinking, improves team performance, and positions your organization for maximum success. Without innovation training, your organization could hinder its ability to compete with other emerging disruptive technologies.

Here are some benefits of innovation:

It enables your organization to satisfy customer needs

One of the primary benefits of innovation training is that it can help your organization better understand and serve customer needs.
In Disruptive Strategy, participants use the JTBD (job-to-be-done) to explore customer needs and examine why customers act the way they do. The theory asserts that rather than buying products and services, customers hire them to perform specific jobs.

One example of a company that uses this theory is PayPal, which serves customers’ needs with easy payment options online. While other platforms can offer this service, PayPal’s large network of merchants, reputation, years of track record, and unique features make it a top choice for customers.

You can help your organization identify the products and services that customers patronize the most by leveraging innovation training. Through interviewing and other strategies, you can improve your company’s offerings to serve your customers’ needs better.

It equips your organization to harness disruption

One advantage of focusing on customer needs is that it prepares your organization to capitalize on disruption. Using techniques and lessons learned from innovation training, you can help your organization craft a strategy that better identifies and considers different customer needs, thereby ensuring it’s well-positioned to respond to new opportunities in the market.

If your business focuses on customer needs, it will open up more opportunities for business growth and innovation management over time.

Innovation training drives organizational growth and performance

Having informed and motivated innovative employees is the key to growth. So beyond influencing innovation, another key impact of innovation training on your organization’s growth and performance is educating your employees for better performance, stronger motivation, and bolder ideas for innovation. Thus, innovation training will position your organization for rapid growth in all ramifications and, consequently, will also impact your company’s revenue increase over time.

Innovation training boosts employee engagement and retention

Innovation training also leads to increased employee engagement and commitment, as the success of every organization depends on employee engagement. Behind every outstanding and thriving organization is a team of employees working collectively to hit organizational goals.

Implementation effect

In an article for Harvard Business School, executives and business leaders describe how innovation training enabled their organizations to transform. As part of the organization’s efforts, it created a network of coaches, ambassadors, and volunteers who, through training, aim to inspire employees to engage in innovation. The initiative led to a network of ambassadors and coaches across 70 countries, 80 percent of which were actively engaged in innovation works, although it was outside the scope of their official roles. Moreover, they found more than 5,000 people participating in innovation webinars, as well as training events.

This approach demonstrates the irrefutable impact innovation training can have on your organization. Not only does it foster a commitment to innovation throughout your organization, but it also mobilizes and aligns its resources.

How to Use Innovation Training to Improve your Innovation Skills

Innovation training is a worthwhile strategy that lets your organization thrive in an ever-evolving market. While there are various resources that can teach you innovation, most professionals recommend a more structured approach, such as online courses.
Innovation is essential for the growth of any organization, but there’s a generic way of describing innovation and innovative techniques. To successfully implement innovation strategies, you need to understand exactly what makes an innovative organization and how it contributes to its growth.
Innovation is about looking for better ways to do the same things you have been doing as an organization. What most people fail to realize is that creativity and innovation are key ingredients to the growth and success of every organization.

Here are some ways you can use innovation training to improve your innovation skills:

Give your workers a sense of freedom and belonging

Employers that impose strict rules and regulations on their workers can never get the best of them. Such acts can even limit the creativity of employees, and, in addition, they will lose their sense of belonging. The result will be not feeling free to share their ideas in innovation meetings. This, in turn, will prevent you from tapping into the creative power of your employees.
The true potential of every innovative organization lies in its employees’ abilities to contribute to the organization’s creative process. So, you need to give your workers the freedom and liberty to express themselves. This might be the most serious investment in your company.
This calls for creating a conducive working environment and culture that allows workers to think outside the box.

Provide your employees the requisite resources to implement innovative ideas

Create a conducive atmosphere that makes it easy and possible for employees to transform their ideas into reality. The truth is, without the right resources, even the best of ideas come to naught.
The most innovative companies in the world invest heavily in their R&D department to allow their creative teams to execute business ideas.
Samsung is one brand topping the list of innovative companies and innovation examples. It has invested over $13 billion in the last year into its R&D department. Stunning, right?

Invest your time in the creative nourishment of your employees

The real essence of innovation management is achieved when you demonstrate to your employees a path of creativity and innovation. Don’t just emphasize the importance of creativity, rather, demonstrate the specific ways to find creativity. This will lead them to implement innovation in discharging their duties.
For instance, you can dedicate a special day to motivating your workers to experiment with their new ideas. In addition, you can conduct weekly workshops to encourage your employees to brainstorm ideas for upcoming projects.
Google is one of the first innovation examples and companies to create a business model based on innovation management. In fact, the company allocates over 30% of its expenses to research and development.

Conclusion

Innovation Training is essential for the growth of every organization. You need to create an atmosphere that makes it easy for employees to exercise their creativity while discharging their duties. We hope the information we shared in this post will help you transform your organization through efficient innovation management.