The present is the perfect opportunity to prepare for the future you want. However, as a leader, you can't create the future alone. You must pilot your team and trailblaze a path they can follow – and create a space for the culture of innovation to flourish. So, prioritizing the most important steps to innovation is essential to future-proofing your company.
In our past future-proofing series, we have touched on six key principles to drive innovation and shift your mindset, emphasizing the important tool your mindset is when driving innovation. We also highlighted creating an innovation culture with massive transformative purpose. The secret to motivating individuals and teams to do great things is a unifying purpose, and establishing a culture of purpose within your team can mean the difference between growth and success or failed plans. Lastly, we detailed innovation sprints, prioritizing experimentation as another crucial mechanism for driving breakthroughs in your organization. Encouraging your teams to celebrate productive failure through experimentation is powerful, and empowering them to explore the unknown and try out bold new concepts enables organizations to drive innovation and sustainable growth.
Once you've designed a good experiment and assembled an intellectually diverse team to tackle it, employing the best management principles to maintain your innovation culture is critical. It often boils down to empowering and enabling high-performance teams with the tools they need and then getting out of their way. Other times, it's a matter of keeping people motivated, engaged, and free to be creative.