Today’s hottest conversation among many executives is on the best strategies to nimbly pivot among our multiple crises. When they decide upon winning strategies, the question then becomes how do we implement strategies successfully.

Our research at InnovationOne has found that the executive teams that have nurtured transparent, collaborative, and agile cultures will do better in normal times, and times of crises, than those with closed and staid cultures.

Some organizations struggle to balance the long-term focus of an innovation culture
with the demands of short-term performance and day-to-day operations. In fact, we have found that low innovators are characterized by siloed approaches, a high degree of risk aversion, lack of internal communication, continual disruption from everyday pressures, and a constant focus on the short term.

By contrast, highly innovative companies build their cultures by:

  • Enthusiastically sharing innovation strategies and competitive information and empowering their employees and external partners to generate solutions;
  • Investing in organizational learning and required job skills and behaviors in
    addition to labs, facilities, and technology;
  • Establishing well-understood processes—sometimes including innovation management software—to allow employees to make suggestions, share critical
    information, build upon each other’s ideas, create prototypes, and submit
    proposals to top management;
  • Making fast decisions on which ideas to invest in, establishing goals and
    milestones, and tracking progress;
  • Empowering lower-level managers and teams to fail fast, shut down unsuccessful
    projects, reallocate resources to what works, and change priorities.
  • Aligning their operations to implement innovative ideas rapidly while also
    meeting this quarter’s commitments to customers and investors;
  • Changing their talent acquisition systems to find and hire diverse thinking and
    skilled workers, and changing their performance management systems to reward questioning, collaboration, teamwork, and success; and
  • Selecting and developing leaders who encourage and reward participation, build
    trust with their teams, help them overcome obstacles, provide development and
    performance feedback, and drive for results.

InnovationOne’s latest research with The Conference Board sheds additional insights into the habits of highly innovative companies and the traits that make them successful.

Other insights on the emerging habits of highly innovative organizations in the digital era include the value of various innovation methodologies and digitization, talent and performance management strategies, and managers who encourage innovation. Excerpts from our joint report were used in this article.

You can download these comprehensive report for free !

Victor Assad is the CEO of Victor Assad Strategic Human Resources Consulting , managing partner of InnovationOne, and Sales Advisor to MeBeBot. He works with companies to transform their HR operations, remote work, and recruiting, and to develop extraordinary leaders, teams, and cultures of innovation. His highly acclaimed  book is Hack Recruiting: the Best of Empirical Research, Method and Process, and Digitization.