How Can Companies Organize for Innovation?

Many companies want to become more innovative. But achieving this isn’t straightforward. There’s no standard solution that works for everyone. A functioning, innovative organizational structure must be custom-designed for each company.

Innovation Comes From Within

The most innovative ideas in a company come from employees themselves. They know how their innovations can be brought to life within the existing organization. But these employees need an organizational structure that enables and encourages innovation - one that often doesn’t exist and must be developed first.

Too often, skeptics within the organization kill innovations before they start. They emphasize risks and question the feasibility of ideas. Countering this is challenging. Concrete results are most convincing. That’s why transformation to an innovative company only truly succeeds when employees are motivated to act entrepreneurially and trigger company-wide momentum through progress and success.

Strategic Use of Top-Down and Bottom-Up

Success can come from multiple sources. That’s why we always consider two directions for transformation. They correspond to the existing hierarchy in companies: from top management down through middle management (top-down) and from within the organization upward (bottom-up).

Our approach: Start small with an innovation team and gradually transfer the collected insights to the entire company. We continuously support this process to ensure successful scaling of the innovation process across the organization.

Bringing the Whole Company Through Transformation

A successful transformation to an innovative company requires support from all levels of the hierarchy. They must all be involved in the innovation process. Here’s our typical approach:

1. Get top management on board: To create a stable foundation for transformation, we involve top management early in the process. First, they need to understand innovation. Two methods work well: developing their own innovation vision and thesis, and running a Speedlab - a one-day workshop that produces a future-oriented objective.

2. Assemble the innovation team: In the context of top management workshops, define an initial innovation team that represents a cross-section of the company (from management to specialist departments). This team starts their first innovation project together, gathering valuable experience on how innovations can truly succeed within their own organizational structure.

3. Convince and inspire middle management: Once the innovation team is working, involve middle management - for example, at a management conference. The goal is to generate energy and motivation for the transformation.

Step by Step to Success

This gradual approach triggers momentum within the company that comes from within - not mandated from above. The newly developed processes and structures can then be rolled out across the entire organization step by step.

To maintain and even increase momentum, continuous top-down and bottom-up support is needed. Beyond workshops and conferences, we recommend installing an innovation board. The innovation team should also receive targeted training. Additionally, implementing knowledge-sharing formats promotes mutual exchange of experiential knowledge.