The businesses best known for being innovative are the ones that create new ways of living, typically household products like dishwashers or personal computers. 

Business innovation, however, encompasses more than just what changes a customer’s life. It’s also about creating new ways of doing business. That’s why innovation is the responsibility of every department. While it is most visible at the product level, innovation at the process and business model level are just as important, if not more so, as it becomes increasingly difficult to develop a truly transformational product. It’s only by constantly looking for better ways to work that businesses continue to grow. If you’re standing in one place, doing the same thing year after year, you’re falling behind.  

Innovation is everybody’s responsibility. An innovation strategy, as this StrategyWerx article details, helps every employee understand their role in improving both internal processes and the customer experience. As the link between each department, human resources has an important role to play in enacting your business’s innovation strategy at every level, in every process.

Responsibilities of the Human Resources Department

HR's role is often misunderstood by everybody at a company outside of HR. That's usually a good thing. When everything is running smoothly—workplace issues are addressed promptly and fairly, everyone is getting paid on time, new hires understand their roles, the business is in compliance with all regulations—no one will notice that HR even exists.

Innovation is a cultural value, and the culture you want to see in the workplace doesn’t just happen on its own. With its responsibilities related to hiring, onboarding, training, and professional development, HR can take the lead in instilling the values and mindsets that lead to a culture of innovation.

Identifying, Hiring, and Nurturing Talent

This is HR’s most important duty when it comes to innovation strategy. While anyone can learn how to be innovative, particularly when a business’s processes are designed to encourage innovation, it’s easier to hire employees who already have experience in this regard. Creativity, collaboration, openness, curiosity, and a growth mindset should be part of the job description.

Employees should also be given opportunities for professional development. Innovative people are curious people. They are constantly learning about anything and everything, and they know how to draw connections between things that don’t seem related. Great new ideas often come from the places and people you least expect. Professional development opportunities, even if they lie outside of an employee’s immediate job responsibilities, give every employee the chance to be one of those people.

Want to encourage more creativity in your organization? See this article.

Improving Organizational Processes

Encouraging innovation begins with hiring. The kind of creativity that results in innovative ideas requires collaboration between different kinds of people with different ways of thinking. According to research by Deloitte, when diverse teams work together, innovation increases by 20%. HR’s first step in driving innovation should be to make diversity a value in hiring.

To get the most out of a diverse team, employees have to feel welcome. Everybody must be given an equal opportunity to speak and be heard. This environment of openness and inclusion will improve collaboration, teamwork, and the free exchange of information.

That last concept—the free exchange of information—is how innovation happens. Individuals or teams that hoard knowledge stand in the way of innovation. The solution to knowledge silos lies in creating cross-functional teams. When employees get to work with people from other departments, they gain a broader view of their own work by seeing how it relates to the work of other employees.

When employees understand their role within a business and how each role contributes to the whole, they are better prepared to understand why a business works the way it does, recognize when it’s not working properly, and suggest ways to improve organizational processes. HR’s role in this regard is to track metrics for continuous improvement, solicit employee feedback, and help employees implement improvement initiatives.

Creating the Right Environment

An environment where innovation happens is one in which every employee feels welcome. In an environment of inclusion, everyone is allowed to speak up, share their ideas, and make mistakes. Employees can’t be afraid that their idea will be ignored or shouted down. At the same time, they should be secure and comfortable enough to know that while they will be heard, not every one of their ideas will be followed up on. It’s much easier to accept that kind of rejection when you know that you are respected. This balance requires trust between employees, teams, and different levels of the hierarchy. It also requires patience: the patience to let a conversation about an idea play out and to explain why an idea is a useful or not so useful one.

Employees in this kind of environment have to have high emotional intelligence and a growth mindset in order to maintain this balance. It’s a common belief that some people are just born creative while others are just born to follow instructions. That belief is indicative of a fixed mindset. The fact is that we’re all creative. We all have the capacity to innovate within our areas of expertise if we’re just given the opportunity and some incentive.

Employees with a growth mindset will be open to the idea that their creativity can grow and develop. The role of HR in creating the right environment is to hire employees who embody this kind of emotional intelligence and growth mindset while developing those traits throughout the onboarding process. As for the people already working at the company, HR can incentivize innovation by recognizing employees who have made improvements within their departments.

The HR Department Is the Innovation Department

Innovation arises out of a strategy that encourages innovation through its processes. In other words, the business is built around innovation. HR stands at the center of innovation strategy in hiring the right people, onboarding them into company culture and processes, training and developing talent, setting goals and rewarding performance, and maintaining the standards of teamwork, inclusion, and continuous improvement, all principles that drive innovation.