By Peter Verschuere

In these economically difficult times, being innovative is a necessity for any organization in order to survive and optimize their growth. However, employees often prefer a status quo or controlable changes because they know how everything operates currently, and they don't want to potentially jeopardise their positions.
The fear associated with being creative or resourceful is usually devastating to an enterprise. 

But I think people are not afraid of change as such. It's rather the uncertainty, the unknown, the lack of a roadmap or guidance they fear. My point is, don't let stagnation and apathy rule your organization. It's here that a great top level manager can make the difference, reflecting through his actions and statements the true desire to embrace collaboration and new idea development.

Here are a few thoughts to help encourage your people to be more creative in their solutions and to drive everyone to seek out new best practices that can be integrated into the community.

Provide a suitable innovation management tool. A good collaborative innovation management tool stimulates creative thinking as much as possible. It serves as the backbone in your company to manage innovative contributions and collaborative actions and enables the processing of all this towards real added value for your company. 

Don't reject creative thinking. Support divergent thoughts. Encourage seasoned as well as novice thinkers to share their ideas. As Mary Lou Cook (volunteer and peace activist) once said: "Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun."

Make the crowd feel safe. There's always some personal risk in presenting new ideas to the community. If the idea is not appreciated by the crowd, the submitter's self-esteem and image are affected. Individuals and the entire company need to be able to stick their necks out and 'give it a go'. This way personal risk is reduced so people can be open and experimental.

Be part of the crowd. Set a good example. Get involved in discussions, give your opinion, and add valuable contributions. People with leaders who are actively involved are also more involved with the community themselves. This way you show that you support, encourage, and need this kind of valuable information that only your people have.

Promote adaptation. There's great power in being able to adapt something from one line of work to another. Let your people know that truly powerful ideas are not necessarily new. Sometimes a same idea used in other lines of work can result in a great new application for your company.

Peter Verschuere is Team Coordinator at CogniStreamer®, an Open Innovation Management System. Learn more about CogniStreamer®, follow our tweets or join us on Facebook.