“Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.” – Theodore Levitt.
A simple-sounding question, “How can we encourage creativity?” but the answer isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. Let us decipher the solution by deliberating on using specific points.
It ain’t Magic: On a bright and sunny Monday morning, your manager calls you and says, “From today, at nine in the morning, you will become creative.” Sorry to disappoint you, but being creative is not magic. It’s not like waving a magic wand, after which you start thinking out of the box. Creativity can come naturally or can be fostered via effective techniques and training.
The Push Mechanism: As a manager, it’s pretty easy to give feedback to employees: “You aren’t innovative, and you haven’t submitted any ideas.” In reality, one cannot push innovation because creativity can get hampered under deadline pressures, as it can limit the brain’s ability to generate new ideas.
The Enthusiast: Identify one or two people who constantly provide ideas or are keen on driving the innovative initiative. Such members can infuse enthusiasm into the team as they can quickly become role models for others to follow suit.
The Pull Mechanism: In today’s technology-driven world, organizations like Kaggle run their competitions to solve business problems. Fostering innovation is an art, and we must follow suit to organize competitions to enhance creativity.
Focus on Different Areas: Competitions need not only to be related to data; one can run competitions similar to hackathons targeting different areas throughout the year.
- Idea-thon: Focus on theme-based/problem-solving competition. The intent is to generate ideas without the pressure of building a prototype. The Aim should be to understand and answer the questions below.
- What is the business problem, and why is it important to solve?
- What can be the high-level solution to solve the problem?
- What will be the ballpark effort/cost estimate required to prototype the idea?
- Detail the business benefits of the idea in terms of cost savings/efforts.
- Write-a-thon: Focus on generating content via knowledge/white papers and project-specific experiences to unearth various case studies and learnings.
- Code-Jam: Focus on enhancing the coding skills of participants via coding competitions, which can help solve a specific problem. Organizations have started using similar methods to hire the right talent.
- QA-Jam: Similar to coding challenges, one could organize a competition focused on Quality Assurance/Testing, an essential part of the software development lifecycle.
- Business/Technology-based themes: The above examples are limited and not all-encompassing as one can leverage and expand the concept towards various technology or business themes.
- Technology Theme: Gain more knowledge of a newly launched technology. For example, we want the team to learn new features of Java/any other technology launched recently.
- Business Theme: Focus on a newly launched regulation or business problem. For example, different organizations ran online competitions during COVID-19 to decipher data to help tackle the impending situation.
- Speakers Competition: Organizations always encourage employees to speak, and what better way to create a platform for employees to gain confidence and share their experiences?
- Marketing Challenge: If you work in a product company, you could focus on creating a marketing plan for a new and upcoming product.
- Shark Tank Inspired: The competition could also be inspired by Shark Tank/The Pitch where a team presents their ideas/solutions and receives investment to fund the development of the solution.
Market your plan: Whatever methodology you choose, you need to market it like a campaign. Create a catchy tagline that can increase the recall value of your plan. Mailers and posters can also be created, which can generate employee curiosity.
Sustainability is Key: My final advice is not to get carried away by only running competitions. The pull mechanism works wonderfully well, but it has to be well thought out and spaced over a year.
The competition is like an annual kick-starter, which can help instill that confidence in employees, but after that, it needs to be self-sustaining. Above all, we don’t need to wait for competition to reward employees who think and drive innovation.
Remember, “Change is the only constant,” and we must keep infusing creativity to allow innovation to burn bright.
