Hi! managers: The growing importance of an innovative environment

Some organisations respond to uncertainty by providing knowledge and spawning ideas that strengthen the capacity of their leaders to unleash innovation and champion changes, so these are currently occurring with greater frequency and on a greater scale than before. Ultimately, the businesses most likely to succeed are those that can translate innovative ideas into reality by implementing them to gain competitive advantages.

In a business context, innovation is a mechanism by which an organisation can draw on its core competencies and transmute them to create outcomes that improve performance. Innovation is cast as a critical determinant of orga-nisational productivity, competition and ability to survive in a turbulent environment. Leaders can make a decisive contribution to innovation by actively and vigorously facilitating the generation of new ideas through organisational networks and by mitigating any resistance to the achievement of their success.

The key issue is not how leaders can make existing work more innovative, but how they can encourage the entire organisation to generate and exploit new ideas.

Innovation emerges from a combination of different types of knowledge as a result of collective effort. Companies may invest billions of dollars in innovation, but without ambitious and inspired individuals, new ideas simply do not emerge. Innovation appears when organisations continuously invest in the deve-lopment of their people. Many innovative ideas do not start at the top, but come from employees in the middle of the organisation who truly understand the importance of innovation and want to do something different. Employees will create new areas of innovation if they realise this is a clear and obvious means of helping their careers to progress. Innovation can also take place if employees are confronted by divergent demands that require improvisation.

Sustaining innovation over time requires an enabling and failure-tolerant environment that inspires employees to remain innovative, including the availability of sponsorship and support from powerful stakeholders within the organisation.

Today's business life cycle is entering a period of constant change that will cause stagnant organisations to quickly fall behind. The challenge is to keep a step ahead of changes in the business environment that unfold over time and touch every aspect of an organisation. In times of economic recession or social transformation, innovation is a practical means of enhancing organisational competitiveness in a changing environment. Leaders are responsible for establishing an organisational climate where innovation and cutting-edge ideas can flourish.

Dr Nutavoot Pongsiri is Chevron Thailand Exploration

and Production's human resources manager. He can be contacted at nutavootp@chevron.com. Follow his articles in the Hi! Managers column every second Friday of the month.