What are the roles that need to be fulfilled at various leve

What are the roles that need to be fulfilled at various levels in order to promote innovation?

Solution

Let us first start with the top management. It is the top management\'s responsibility to make the organization design to promote an innovation culture. To do so, the structure should be flat and organic so that the communication, interaction, and knowledge sharing can be done in a barrier-free manner. Second, they should promote innovation-friendly culture by encouraging people at every level to innovate. However, this is not going to happen simply by oral communication. The top managers must demonstrate their abilities to digest failure and restart. In order to promote innovativeness, they must participate actively in innovative projects to send signals of their interest to the entire organization.

When it comes to HR, the primary activity becomes hiring people with an entrepreneurial mindset. The hiring policies and procedures must be modified so that at every level, such candidates with innovative and entrepreneurial mindset are preferred over the other. Moreover, the other facet of HR\'s responsibility is the training and development and this should be designed to inculcate Divergent thinking in the workplace. The content and delivery method may differ according to the specific needs of the divisions but overall all of them should support innovativeness and divergent thinking. Design and implementation of a knowledge management system are also essential for moving towards an innovation culture. This is also a primary responsibility of the HR.

When it comes to the Finance, a lot of CAPEX should be spent in strategic innovative projects not only in R&D or product innovation but also in process innovation or business process re-engineering. The managers should be encouraged to utilize the assigned budgets to implement their innovative solutions which they are supposed to come up with their respective teams.

Finally, the line managers and supervisors must try to improve the knowledge, ability, and motivation of the people working in their respective teams to participate in the process of innovation. To do so, they must implement the changes in the individual performance management criteria which need a radical shift from performance-based metrics to potential-based metrics and must support rewarding people for implementing innovative projects. Generating, managing, and implementing the new ideas is one crucial aspect of innovation which makes the innovation strategy streamlined into operation and are also responsibilities of the line managers.