Ways to Develop Innovation
Culture
Seta A. Wicaksana
Founder and CEO www.humanikaconsulting.com and hipotest.co.id

Seta A. Wicaksana
0811 19 53 43
wicaksana@humanikaconsulting.com
• Business Psychologist
• Pendiri dan Direktur Humanika Consulting dan hipotest.com
• Anggota Komite Nominasi dan Remunerasi Dewan Komisaris PT Askrindo
• Sekretaris Prodi MM Program Pasca Sarjana Universitas Pancasila
• Dosen Tetap dan Peneliti di Fakultas Psikologi Universitas Pancasila
• Pembina Yayasan Humanika Edukasi Indonesia
• Wakil Ketua Asosiasi Psikologi Forensik Indonesia wilayah DKI
• Penulis Buku: Sobat Way (2016), Industri dan Organisasi: Pendekatan Integratif dalam
menghadapi Perubahan (2020), Human Faktor Engineering: Integratif Desain Manusia
dan Lingkungan Kerja (2021), Psikologi Industri dan Organisasi (2021), Psikologi Umum
(2021), Manajemen Pengembangan Talenta (2021), PIODiagnostik: Pengukuran Psikologi
di Lingkungan Kerja (2021), Transformasi Digital: Perspektif Organisasi, Talenta dan
Budaya Organisasi (2021), Psikologi Pelayanan (2021) dan Psikologi Konsumen (2021).
• Dosen Tidak Tetap di: Program Pasca Sarjana Ekonomi di Univ. Pancasila, STP TRISAKTI,
Fakultas Psikologi Universitas Mercu Buana, STIKOM IMA
• Certified of Assessor Talent Management
• Certified of Human Resources as a Business Partner
• Certified of Risk Professional
• Certified of HR Audit
• Ilmu Ekonomi dan Manajemen (MSDM) S3 Universitas Pancasila
• Fakultas Psikologi S1 dan S2 Universitas Indonesia
• Sekolah ikatan dinas Akademi Sandi Negara

Background
• Without an active innovation culture, organizations fall into
stagnation and lose to more innovative competitors. You know
this all too well if you work for a corporate business that strives
to compete with the likes of Tesla, Airbnb, or Uber. Every
industry has startups like these, and they’re on a roll. The
services and products they provide are not too different from
those you offer — but why do they outperform established
corporations?
• Innovation culture has long been one of the most challenging,
and oft-discussed, topics in our conversations with business and
innovation leaders.
• Given the extraordinary importance of innovation for
businesses, and society in general, and the fact that culture has
been shown to be one of the biggest barriers for innovation
performance, it’s not much of a surprise.
• Because most large companies we talk to want to create a more
innovative company culture, we thought we’d create this
extensive guide to help understand what really makes a culture
innovative, as well as how to actually shape an existing culture
towards innovation.

Innovation Culture
• According to an HBR article, culture is the consistent, observable
patterns of behavior in an organization.
• Or as Aristotle once said: “We are what we repeatedly do.”
• Thus, organizational culture is basically a sum of all the practices,
processes, habits, values, structures, incentives, and people that the
organization has.
• It’s really important for leaders to understand that culture isn’t just a
warm and fuzzy feeling, or an end result of a well-worded value
statement, but a very concrete representation of what actually
happens in the organization, especially when someone isn’t there to
give explicit instructions.
• Innovative cultures start with a philosophy and a tone—one
analogous to the classic parenting advice that children need both
“roots and wings.” As an innovation leader, you must ground creative
people in accountability for the organization’s objectives, key focus
areas, core capabilities, and commitments to stakeholders. Then you
give them broad discretion to conduct their work in service of those
parameters. Obsessing too much about budget and deadlines will kill
ideas before they get off the ground.
• Thus, an innovation culture is simply an organizational culture that
values and supports innovation, so people can actually make
innovation happen around the organization.

Why Is It Important To
Cultivate A Culture Of
Innovation?
• Helps businesses to survive - It involves generating viable ideas and
going beyond the traditional ways of doing things. It modifies
business models and matches them with the evolving needs of the
market, resulting in better products and services. The importance of
a strong culture is especially apparent when the organization is
facing a crisis or other kind of extremely challenging situation, which
unfortunately so many currently are.
• Empowers employees to work and think innovatively - Most of the
biggest game-changers in history have innovation cultures that do
not only emphasize the importance of innovation but also that of
their workforce. They bank on their employees’ abilities and
constantly remind them how valuable their insights are for success.
• Leads to impactful strategies and innovative solutions - As
innovation culture focuses on results, institutions are reinforced to
clearly define their goals and desired outcomes. Thus, standards are
made and strategies are formulated to achieve the company’s
objectives.

Why Is It Important To
Cultivate A Culture Of
Innovation?
• Encourages diversity within the organization - Diversity brings
different backgrounds, knowledge, voices, and expertise together.
Putting them in one table means producing distinct products and
services, examining issues from various perspectives, and abstaining
from certain biases that may inhibit growth. Organizations that have a
strong culture, generally gel together in the face of adversity and
actually perform better in a crisis than in normal times.
• Causes organizational and business growth - Innovation is defined as
the process of realizing new products, processes, propositions, or
business models to create added value for customers and the
organization. Embedding this as an attitude rather than seeing it as a
task drives growth in all aspects of the business. Simply put, a strong
innovation culture is the engine that drives the organization to
constantly get better, move forward, and innovate.
• Learning more - All of that leads to the company obviously learning
more, but also creating measurable positive impact, which again fuels
the desire for more innovation.

The Benefits Of Having An
Innovative Work Culture Include
The Following (Swisher, 2016)
• Sets a course for improvement
• Helps develop new ideas
• Leads to company growth
• Gives a competitive advantage
• Increases team efficiency
• Develops an adaptive nature
• Appeals to more talented professionals
• Improves the company brand

What Makes A Culture
Innovative?
• Harvard Professor Gary Pisano recently wrote an excellent piece on
The Hard Truth About Innovative Cultures, which I think perfectly
captures the essence of why creating a truly innovative company
culture is so difficult.
• According to Pisano, innovative cultures are often very
misunderstood. He goes on to say:
• "The easy-to-like behaviors that get so much attention are only
one side of the coin. They must be counterbalanced by some
tougher and frankly less fun behaviors.
• A tolerance for failure requires an intolerance for
incompetence. A willingness to experiment requires rigorous
discipline. Psychological safety requires comfort with brutal
candor. Collaboration must be balanced with individual
accountability. And flatness requires strong leadership.
Innovative cultures are paradoxical.
• Unless the tensions created by this paradox are carefully
managed, attempts to create an innovative culture will fail.”
• It is this paradoxical ability of being able to combine attributes and
behaviors that are typically seen as mutually exclusive, that really
creates an innovative culture.
• So, to get real results from innovation, you need to have the right kind
of balance across a range of key characteristics and behaviors.

Key Characteristics Of An
Innovative Culture
• Unique strategy: An innovative strategy often involves specific
goals and a strategy specifically designed for and by the
company.
• Autonomy: When the workplace has an innovative culture, it
often gives employees freedom in how they work to
accomplish goals.
• Trust: An environment of trust encourages employees to
share ideas and attempt new methods to accomplish goals.
• Accepting failures: Innovation may lead to some failures along
the way. Allowing these failures helps employees be more
creative without the fear of defeat or making a mistake.
• Leadership: Good leaders with effective management abilities
help maintain an innovative culture. However, it’s best
implemented when employees act as leaders, too.

Three Significant Traits Of
Innovation Culture
• Innovation culture focuses on setting goals and achieving them - Because the
customers’ needs are evolving, businesses must catch up by implementing necessary
improvements (even at a gradual pace). With an innovation culture, companies focus
on the outcome, despite applying small steps in the present to reduce innovation
risks. When business leaders communicate goals with trust, employees feel driven
with purpose.
• Innovation culture encourages learning - Innovation culture encourages learning by
providing various learning channels that employees can use to continually improve
and refine their skills. This way, they get to develop all the attitudes and techniques
required to improve or maintain the company’s position in the market. These
learning opportunities also allow them to discover their strengths and weaknesses
more, along with other opportunities that they can seize to showcase their
capabilities as future leaders with insightful inputs for the business.
• Innovation culture understands the value of risks and failures - Innovation culture
does not like failure, but it acknowledges how failure can help the organization in
numerous ways. It also sees failure as a part of innovation, and it places high regard
on evaluating risk levels for discovery, successful implementation, and feedback. It
celebrates success, but it deals with and learns from risks and failures.

Leaders create an Innovative Culture
• Creating an innovative culture at work can
improve employee satisfaction, team
productivity, and the quality of the company’s
products and services.
• It can also help grow brands, attract
prospective employees, keep talent in the
workforce, and help generate revenue (Indeed
Editorial Team, 2021).
• While innovation strategy varies depending on
the market and business goals, some
challenges are universal.
• For example, if an executive may be struggling
to manage the company’s innovation efforts to
produce the results planned for.
• The leader of an innovation project may be
finding it hard to garner the support needed
from senior management (Swisher2016).

How To Build An
Innovation Culture
• Determine your goals - Before you can encourage your
employees to work together on a certain project, your goals and
target results must be clear and precise. Get them to align their
thoughts and strategies on a single objective. Watch different
ideas collide and listen to different perspectives.
• Encourage people to think outside the box - Show your team
that you value unconventional thinking. Remind them during your
brainstorming sessions that there are no bad ideas, that relevant
discussions may arise from their suggestions, and that
suggestions for improvement are always welcome.
• Be genuinely interested in their opinions - Motivate your team
members to share their thoughts on various issues that your
company is facing. Promote idea sharing, thorough discussion,
and collaboration in devising solutions that you can use to
respond to these challenges.

How To Build An
Innovation Culture
• Conduct innovation workshops - Raise awareness about the importance
of innovation in a company. Promote the involvement of your employees
by conducting innovation workshops across all hierarchy levels. Explain to
them what their roles are and make them understand how significant
their contributions can be.
• Create idea challenges - Encourage everyone to share their ideas by
creating fun idea challenges. Form a committee of experts to evaluate the
feasibility of every presented concept. You can also apply gamification
features to make this competition more exciting for all the participants.
• Don’t forget about the rewards - Building an innovation culture includes
rewarding and recognizing innovative behavior. Offer raises and
promotions to employees who consistently provide creative and feasible
concepts. Celebrate innovation efforts and commend innovation teams for
a job well done.

How To Build An
Innovation Culture
• Provide constructive feedback - Don’t be so quick in turning down ideas.
Discuss them with the rest of the team and find out if you can improve
them. If not, provide constructive feedback and acknowledge the effort
(and the courage) exhibited to present it.
• Train your team to think like entrepreneurs - When you encourage your
employees to think like they own the business, great things can happen —
and one of them is when they get to develop a mindset that supports
continuous innovation and business development.
• Avoid unnecessary bureaucracy - Bureaucracy leads to lag times and
organizational churn that decelerates innovation. It places roadblocks on
innovators and causes unwarranted frustration. Abstain from any form of
bureaucracy and support rapid experimentation all the time.
• Discourage silos - Innovation needs a group of diverse people who can
provide new and unique perspectives on existing challenges. Encourage
people across functional teams to work together within a given period.

How Can Leaders Build an
Innovative Work Culture?
• Actively motivate and encourage innovation from employees. Invite them to share ideas
during company meetings and discuss company problems and solutions in a group
environment.
• Build trust within the team–be honest, admit mistakes, take ownership, be dependable,
and collaborate. Try team-building exercises to help people feel free to share ideas
without being judged.
• Ask customers for feedback/invite customers to feedback rounds
• Ask stakeholders for feedback
• Invest in training for employees
• Actively invest resources in research and development (R&D)
• Partner with startups and innovative companies
• Build an intrapreneurship program
• Express that failure is an option. Make sure everyone understands that a part of getting
to success often includes some failures.
• Actively research on the Internet (industry news, tech news, etc.)
• Survey/interview/meet with experts
• Incorporate innovation into the business strategy. Establish a company innovation vision,
set goals, and share values to promote innovation in the workplace.
• Establish a reward system for innovative thinking, such as rewarding employees’
progress in innovation with commission-based pay, promotions, bonuses, time off,
treats, events, special recognition, or sharing in the innovation profits.

Conclusion
• Having a culture of innovation is vital for any organization that is looking to
innovate and achieve or maintain a leading position in their own field.
• It’s the foundation that really enables organizations to innovate repeatably, and
at scale. Many leaders also sorely underestimate the importance this has on not
just financial results, but also on the impact an organization can make at large.
• There are, however, a lot of misconceptions about innovative organizational
cultures. It isn’t just the warm and fuzzy startup vibe we’re often led to believe it
is. These cultures certainly aren’t all fun and games.
• Sure, an innovation culture always has room for creativity, empathy, and
freedom, but those attributes also need to be balanced with some of the
tougher, and frankly not so fun, ones like discipline and individual accountability.
• Innovation culture is made up of practices that support and strengthen
innovation as a significant aspect of progress and growth. It includes all
structures, habits, processes, instructions, pursuits, and incentives that
institutions implement to make innovation happen.
• Having said that, creating an innovation culture isn’t impossible, it just takes a
lot of dedication, persistence and hard work.

References
• https://www.viima.com/blog/innovation-culture
• Abrams, M. (2021, December 23). How to make your
company more innovative. Bit Rebels.
https://bitrebels.com/business/how-make-company-more-
innovative/#:~:text=Here%20are%20several%20ways%20you
%20can%20encourage%20more,With%20Creatives.%203%20
3.%20Require%20Time%20Off.%20
• Indeed Editorial Team. (2021, May 21). Ten types of
organizational structure (with pros and cons). Indeed.
https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-
development/types-of-organizational-structures
• Swisher, P. (2016, July 29). How to lead successful innovation:
Lessons from experts. Professional Development Harvard
Division of Continuing Education.
https://professional.dce.harvard.edu/blog/how-to-lead-
successful-innovation-lessons-from-experts/

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