romoting innovation managers give people freedom to take risks, but don’t criticise mistakes when they occur. We all make big decisions and take on large responsibilities in our personal lives, so why not make this the norm at work? Another way of promoting psychological safety is to create a working environment akin to the home environment. For example, give individuals the freedom to make their own decisions about how they work, don’t restrict the design of the office to the traditional - allow people to make it feel like home in the layout and decoration, or allow work to be sociable.Strategic meaningTaking pride in innovation can be done by celebrating success and making innovations highly visible. By putting it on the corporate agenda, both literally and metaphorically, employees recognise the importance of innovation.Resource innovation Resourcing innovation could simply be building a strong R&D unit. However this favours product innovation over process innovation and doesn't guarantee either. Other ways to resource innovation are to create time for individuals and groups to consider change, to fund communication, familiarisation and training of new processes, and to give innovation champions the financial and staff resources they need to turn ideas it into something which can be implemented. Innovation often happens in pockets within the organisation, and where resources (time, money, people) are flexible enough to feed emergent ideas ongoing innovation can be sustained.Individual action Organisations are made up of individuals, and therefore one of the keys to a healthy organisation is in its human resources. To be innovative an organisation should consist of people at all levels of the organisation, i.e. non-managers as well as managers, who are creative, who welcome change, and who are not restricted by unfamiliarity. These things occur naturally in some people and an organisation can recruit those who have these a...
