In East Germany, the working climate was often such
that is was more important to 
than being productive, not to mention innovative. In fact, initiative was discouraged.
make no mistakes
Increasing  creativity
in the organisation. There
are two basic approaches:
Fire & hire
in which you fire all the noncreative,
boring people and hire people with 
exciting ideas and follow-through instead.
Even if you think this seems like an ideal approach, Swedish labor laws makes it tricky. So instead, what I decided to examine was...
Organisational factors
that promote innovative work behavior
in employees.

Because the creative person is not some mythical
creature, but you and me and everyone we know.

Individual factors, like personality of thinking styles, are not irrelevant, but if you are an employer or a leader, you have to work with what you can reasonably change.
Of the        factors I found to affect 
innovative work behaviour, in this presentation, I will focus on      .
3
1
Fear.
Ok, so maybe that seems very dramatic. Most people
today do not feel terror when they are at work, and this 
is not the kind of fear I am talking about.

But when you're being creative, you are challenging the
status quo. You're doing something new, and you might
fail.                 is involved.
Risk
Also, it might be more or less scary
to  simply share an idea that is yours.

I mean, people might laugh at you.

These are real factors that do affect people.
Open & safe
An open and safe work environment is recognized
by a                              for...
tolerance
trying new things
making mistakes
and voicing dissent
Lets examine them closer.
What they are, and how to promote them.
Dissent
Solomon Asch did some experiments
on conformity in the 50's that showed that
an alarmingly high rate of people would 
rather trust their peers (who were all in on the 
experiment and gave false answers) than their
eyes when judging which of these lines on the 
right is equal to the one on the left.
However, there was an easy way to get people to trust
what they thought they saw, and say it.

Dissent.

If just one of the peers would give a different answer,
the test subjects would speak their mind. It didn't even
have to be the right answer. Just                          .
different
You need a system in place to take care of incoming ideas.

This system should not allow an employee's manager to veto ideas worth investing more in. That could cause people to come up with "ideas their boss might like," not the best ideas they can think of.
If you want people to initiate things,
reward initiative.

Not success.
Don't expect people to go out on a limb
to suggest something new and assume ownership
and responsibility for seeing it through

in an organization where people's number one
concern is
Trying new things
New ideas and things are in themselves a kind of
dissent, since they are diverging from the status quo. 
That's what makes them new!

If you want innovation, obviously you have to allow for the
new, not just doing (however excellently) what has worked
in the past.
When I say "reward", it doesn't have to be an
actual reward, like money. Actually this might 
destroy the intrinsic motivation to generate
ideas & run with them!

So rather than explicitly rewarding the behaviour,
don't punish it. And don't reward opposing, mutually
exclusive behaviours!
However, people in power today got there
by doing what worked in the past.
So it's not always wise to let one of them, alone, decide 
what constitutes a promising idea.
Making mistakes
This one might rub some people the wrong way,
but it is very important.

Treat mistakes as learning experiences. Really.

If people who somehow fail get their heads chopped
off, most people will try very hard not to fail. One way 
of avoiding failure is, of course, to do nothing. Never
to do anything at which you might fail.

How do you learn anything new, if you only engage in
activities you already master, doing them the same
way as always?
A customer I worked with were running behind on 
their testing of the system we were building.

There was very little initiative among the testers. And
the closer we got to the tests closing, the more it seemed
likely they would not make the deadline. And the less
anybody wanted to initiate                            since that 
would imply responsibility.

And nobody wanted to be held responsible for the tests
not finishing on time. For failure.
anything
 "not making a mistake."
If people can gain more by keeping knowledge to
themselves, they are less likely to share it.

If people are punished for trying and failing, they 
might do the safe thing and keep their heads down.
Humans are imaginative. It is a great part of what makes us
distinctively human. We have ideas about the future that we
act on, and we create things.

If you want people to be innovative in your organisation, 
just                             .





let them
Don't punish dissent.
Avoid bottlenecks in the evaluation of generated ideas.
Encourage trying new things, even when it means to try & fail. 
Use failure to learn how to succeed. We can only try & succeed if
we do, in fact, try.
(the answer is C)
Increasing innovative work behaviour
A presentation by Gisela Jönsson
For more on creativity and how we work:
http://blog.mindspark.se