Fostering a culture of innovation

One of the key components of being successful in implementing AI at a transformational level is building your company’s culture around innovation and AI in particular.

A culture of innovation means creating a culture where every employee feels he or she has some level of autonomy to think independently and find new ways to solve problems. If you’re the one in charge, it means you should put forward your decisions, but leave an open window for new ideas coming from your team. Trust is important.

You should encourage taking a reasonable risk and allow the uncertainty of results if you want to foster innovation. Developing new ideas is an iterative discovery process and as such needs people and ideas to flow freely. Understanding that this does not always lead to a product is also a key. Failure is an important aspect of building an innovative culture. You can’t hide failures. Instead, talk them over with your team. A truly innovative culture rewards people for their involvement in generating ideas and executing them, it doesn’t just pay for ideas. You should think of innovation as a mindset and a framework for running a business process rather than an end goal.

Openness is another critical aspect of building an innovative culture. The innovative culture welcomes different points of view, different perspectives and seeks to associate disparate ideas and technologies into new products and services. You never should hear an argument “we’ve never done that before” as a way to shut down ideas – on the contrary, it should be considered a challenge worth pursuing in the innovative culture.