If you're not sure about the ultimate impact of corporate culture on innovation, look no further than Newark, Delaware, home of W.L. Gore, a privately held, $3 billion-a-year company with close to 10,000 employees that has prided itself on employee-driven innovation for six decades. In their seminal book A Passion for Excellence, Tom Peters and Nancy Austin observed that when an employ comes on board with the company, they aren't given assignments, they're encouraged to find assignments. The company's founder, Bill Gore, once said, "The objective of the enterprise is to make money and have fun doing so."
Can such a spirit of unfettered innovation last in today's data-intensive digital era? Yes, and more so, says Andres Angelani, CEO of Cognizant Softvision, In his forthcoming book, Transforming While Performing: How to Create a Culture of Innovation with Partners, Angelani says digital helps open the gates of rapid, fail-fast type of innovation. He outlines the key elements of innovation: starting with a gamification approach to meeting objectives, along with a design approach to management.
Promote a culture of continuous innovation. "Exposure is key," Angelani writes. "By focusing on uncovering the human problem behind the business problem, the human-centered organization analyzes the experiences offered on the market and seeks to understand what the customers are looking to get done, what pains they must go through, and what gains they are achieving, to provide the best possible solution. Design’s exploratory mindset, abductive thinking, associative processing, and tinkering approach to challenges and opportunities become a facilitator."
Foster innovation and motivation through design. "When design principles are applied to strategy and innovation, the success rate for innovation dramatically improves," he states. "Design-driven companies understand and uncover the rationale. It’s just as important to them to understand why they want it. Design-driven companies invest a great deal of time observing, listening, and learning the motivation behind why and how people experience and use their products."
Humanize experiences. "Machine learning and AI make the insights of big data actionable and allow companies to better respond to customers in a personal and relevant way," Angelani says. The ability to interact with another person or in a group is innately human. Personalization, or the custom tailoring of messages or offers to individuals based on their actual behavior, is considered the Holy Grail of the digital world."
