Fostering Innovation In Your Organization

"Innovation. The Challenge of Continual Newness."
by George Siemens (published February 2003)
http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/ innovation.htm
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In this article George Siemens outlines how organizations can create a favourable climate for innovation:

"We need an environment that fosters the expression of new ideas, a process for capturing and evaluating them, and finally a means of sharing them across an organization."

Siemens summarizes key characteristics of...
- innovation
- innovators
- innovation-fostering environments
- and innovation-facilitating organizational structures.

If you want to encourage and foster innovation in your own organization, this article helps you to identify in which direction to move. Before you start heading for your goals you should, however, analyze very well where your organization is standing right now.

Here are three valuable tools to assess the climate for innovation in your organization:

a) Climate questionnaire
This tool is designed to help assess the climate in your group / organisation. The questions are taken from the London Business School Survey Unit, a group which specialises in employee attitude surveys. These questions are a selection from a complete questionnaire of around 150 items. They are the items which, through statistical analysis of previous responses, group into one factor which has been called a Climate for Innovation Factor.

You can answer the questions yourself, or why not ask some other people in your organisation to answer them too to get a more complete picture of your work climate. Once you have answered them we will calculate your innovation climate score and tell you how you compare to a number of other companies who have completed it.

http://www.innovation.org.uk/toolset/ climate.html

b) KEYS
KEYS is a 360-degree assessment tool that assesses the climate for creativity and innovation that exists in a work group, division or organization. It measures management practices that impact the work environment.
The KEYS assessment tool:

- Measures the management practices that impact innovation.

- Provides information about how creativity and productivity are perceived within the organization.

- Compares an organization's creative climate with other top-level organizations in the KEYS database.

- Uses data from the survey results as the first step in creating an action plan for improvement.

http://www.ccl.org/products/keys/ index.html

 

 

c) Situational Outlook Questionnaire (SOQ)
The Situational Outlook Questionnaire (SOQ) is a tested and true measure of psychological, team and organizational climate for creativity and change. Used for more than ten years in organizations throughout the world the SOQ has proven to be a valuable means for leaders and managers to determine their organizations readiness for change and the introduction of deliberate creativity into their daily life.

http://www.cpsb.com/cnk/soq.html

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