Structuring Front End Innovation

Attitudes to Failure and the Working Environment for Front End Innovation

We often see the FEI process being referred to as ‘fuzzy’ due to the combination of convergent and divergent thinking required when delivering excellence. However, the values of FEI come from companies taking a grasp of their FEI process with a structured approach. This blog post focuses on two of the key aspects to address when structuring the FEI process; attitudes to failure and the working environment.

Attitudes to Failure
An organisational culture is the backbone to how employees act and react. An innovative culture has an underlying ability to make subconscious decisions on what to innovate, how to innovate and when to innovate. Leadership is an element that influences this subconscious notion and plays a large role in the way an organisational culture is practiced and how it evolves over time. Leaders need to be able to understand the value of failure and the importance of effectively learning from it. If there is a situation where no projects are failing, then it may a case of the organisation not pushing the boundaries or that they are scared to fail. It is how leadership deals with failure that enforces an innovative culture. One approach is ensuring that the key learnings are fed into other projects, so that the same mistake does not occur again, this will enable the other project to advance further based on the past learnings from the failed project. However, this transition of learnings is not easy, leadership and management need to be proactive in this space and no lose sight of the advantages it may create for the business in the long run.

The Working Environment
The working environment is an important aspect to consider when forming or sustaining an innovative culture. The environment needs to be engaging, encouraging both internal and external networking of ideas and discussions, but not discounting the need to have ‘quiet zones’ to create a healthy balance of working environments.

Communicate of words and ideals to the workforce can enhance an innovative culture and enhance a working environment (if displayed visually), for example, Procter & Gamble’s ‘Innovation is everyone’s job’ mantra. This gives the workforce a collective responsibility to actively seek to innovate in their day-to-day work flow. Furthermore, ensuring that communication is narrow, clear, and repetitive to set expectations wins people’s trust (Howard Schultz, Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul, 2011).