4 Innovation Management Skills to Promote Change & Innovation

To innovate successfully, your team should live and breathe creativity. This will lead to a few changes (or maybe a lot) and set you up for opening new revenue streams. An efficient innovation manager like yourself should not feel intimidated. On the contrary, you must embrace this disruption with open arms! But we understand that this is not a piece of cake. So, we are bringing to you 4 innovation management skills and tactics that are critical for encouraging change and innovation. Let’s dive right in:

4 Innovation Management Skills & Tactics to Embrace

1. Encourage Brainstorming Sessions

Nothing can beat the power of good old brainstorming sessions! At times, you might find effective ways to solve big problems just by having a fruitful discussion with your team. The same goes for ideation. Brainstorming not only helps in collecting creative ideas but also adds different perspectives to those ideas. This amalgamation often elevates an idea to the next level or offers you multiple ideas based on the original one.

So, consider allotting some time to hold regular brainstorming sessions or group workshops. Remember! A good discussion never goes in vain even if you fail to collect any concrete ideas. The points gathered from the sessions might well be very relevant for future endeavors.

2. Reward Creative Thinkers

Would you be enthusiastic to work hard for an organization if you don’t feel valued? No, right? Similarly, your team won’t feel motivated to contribute to the company’s success if their efforts are not recognized. This is why, as an innovation manager leading the team, you should reward their efforts.

You can arrange award schemes for the creative thinkers whose ideas make it to the next stage. But don’t forget to appreciate the other players who constantly make meaningful suggestions, no matter if they are implemented or not. A rich flow of ideas and suggestions should always be welcomed. You never know when one of them might spark a game-changing innovation!

3. Stay Curious

Healthy curiosity is one of the most vital managerial skills that you can have. You won’t be able to encourage your team to explore new things if you are not curious yourself. Your curiosity will drive their hunger to keep up with the new technological trends and innovations.

For example, Trend Intelligence solutions can feed your curiosity with meaningful insights. You will be able to stay ahead of the technological curve by discovering compelling business models, emerging technologies, and disruptive trends impacting your business.

4. Shake Things Up Once in a While

Monotony is the enemy of creativity. To break the chain, figure out various new ways to perform the same old tasks. This will spice up things and lead to improved performance.

To make sure everyone’s on board, ask your team for their suggestions. We are sure that they already have plenty of ideas! And here’s a bonus one from us — swap job temporarily. This will broaden your team’s experiences and induce fresh perspectives to existing job roles, which will bring improvements in all departments.

We would love to hear from you — do you agree with our list? What are other innovation management skills that you have found useful in your job? Get in touch & let us know!