Challenge 7: Do you celebrate and reward innovation?

Diagnosis

Celebrating and rewarding innovation efforts is a key component of innovation culture. It’s through celebrating and rewarding your employees contributions to innovation or innovation orientation that you will increase motivation and engagement, encourage risk-taking, inspire others to join the innovation efforts and will decrease the risk of losing ambitious and skilful employees.

Positive aspects	Negative aspects
In your company you have clear strategy for recognising employees or teams that have developed and implemented innovative solutions.	Innovation is underlined as important by managers, but there is no clear strategy for rewarding innovation engagement and performance.
Your company has periodical events or sessions where employees can showcase their innovative projects and ideas to the wider organization.	Employees don’t have clear information what benefits they can obtain with their effective engagement in innovation.
We have a reward specifically dedicated to innovation engagement and achievements.	Employees don’t have clear understanding what kind of innovation is looked for by the company and will be rewarded.
We have specific days or weeks for celebrating innovation, with activities, workshops, and presentations focused on creative thinking.	The rewards are in place, but the punishment for failing/pressure on avoiding failure is significant.
Innovative achievements are highlighted in company-wide meetings, giving employees the opportunity to share their successes.	Innovation initiatives are significantly rewarded, but innovators need to face the reality of work overload if they wish to engage in innovation.
We have a section in the company newsletter dedicated to showcasing innovative initiatives and the people behind them or an alternative way to include it within company broad communication – emails, digital or physical space to display information about ongoing innovative projects and their progress.	There is no clear understanding what the criteria are for being considered an efficient contributor to innovation or how the innovation reward are assigned.
There are promotions, advancements, financial or physical rewards for employees who consistently contribute innovative ideas and demonstrate a commitment to driving change.	Innovative ideas are welcome and recognised, but there is lack of structured processes and resources for idea evaluation, and implementation.
There is a budget available to employees for pursuing innovative projects or ideas, giving them resources to bring their concepts to life.	Managers are dissatisfied with employees that got ‘distracted’ by innovation, rather than focussing on high performance of day-to-day operational tasks.
We have a peer-to-peer recognition system where employees can nominate each other for their contributions to innovation.

Actions for implementation

1. Think about the way innovation is highlighted now in your organisation.
2. Whether innovation is already a part of your activities or you are getting ready for it, think of ways that will work best in your organisation to acknowledge innovation efforts, motivate others and reward contributors and risk-takers. Consider for example:
   - internal innovation showcase events - event where teams present their innovative projects or ideas to the entire company. This could be in the form of presentations, demonstrations, or posters.

• Company-wide updates on ongoing innovation efforts – this could take a form of section in a newsletter, email communication, mentions on the information boards, or updates during weekly meeting.
• Innovation awards - establishing awards that recognize different aspects of innovation, such as the most creative idea, the most impactful project, or the team that demonstrated exceptional collaboration. Think of what would motivate your team, whether it will be additional budgets, team-building or leisure activities, additional holiday days, financial rewards or others, think about what will work best for your company and employees morale.
• Innovation Roundtables or workshops - informal roundtable discussions where employees can share their innovative experiences, challenges, and successes for open conversations and knowledge sharing or workshops focused on creative thinking, problem-solving, and idea generation.
• Innovation re-treat or off-site - a retreat or offsite dedicated to innovation discussions, brainstorming, and team-building activities that reinforce the importance of creativity and helps to change perspective on current challenges moving discussions about innovation and highlighting current efforts to alternative, less formal settings.

1. Feel free to test, mix and create new approaches to acknowledging, highlighting and rewarding innovation which will align with your unique innovation culture.
2. Invite other team members to the process. You can use the process as one of your first innovation initiatives focused on how we will acknowledge and recognise innovation since now on.