While employees working from home have stayed productive during the course of this year, a new study by Microsoft suggests that innovation has declined. In short, productivity doesn’t drive innovation.

According to the report, while business continuity and productivity have broadly remained unchanged, business leaders across the globe are reporting a decrease in innovation during covid around core products and services.

“COVID-19 has put a significant bend in the road for every organisation, and how businesses adapt will determine how well they succeed in the future,” notes Crispin Manners, CEO of Onva Consulting and author of Engagement Multiplier’s new survey titled “Kickstarting Innovation: Creating a Culture of Ideas in a Post-Covid World.”

The companies that stand the best chance of success, Crispin notes, are those that strike a pragmatic balance between the defensive moves necessary to weather a recession, such as cost-cutting, and investment in the future, as discussed in the article entitled “Roaring out of Recession” published by the Harvard Business Review.

If the word “investment” is a particularly painful one at this moment, it’s important to remember that investment can be in the form of time and energy, instead of capital. For companies seeking to spark innovation, especially those whose teams are still working from home, creating a framework to inspire and facilitate innovation is crucial.

Introducing the new “Kickstarting Innovation” survey 

Enter our new Kickstarting Innovation survey. Designed to help business owners understand what they will need to do to capitalize on the intellectual power of their people, the survey explores the elements of the innovation process, including:

  • Incremental innovation – the available innovation potential for incremental improvements
  • Transformational innovation – the available innovation potential for ideas that could transform your products, services, or internal processes
  • Your company’s approach to innovation, and where it needs to focus to unlock the innovative potential of its people
  • The success of your innovations, and whether the company is creating an innovation culture that increases the likelihood of success for each innovation.
  • COVID-19 related innovation, whether your people feel they are involved in the changes you already have underway.

Available as an On-Demand survey that can either be used as a stand-alone survey or bundled with our Benchmark Assessment, the Kickstarting Innovation survey will help leaders quickly assess the health and vitality of the innovation process within their company, and enable them to act quickly to mend gaps that are hampering the flow of ideas.

The ideas your employees have can prove invaluable and are gleaned from their first-hand experience with customers, product support, and internal processes.

“In our experience, every employee has at least one idea for improving internal processes or products and services,” says Crispin. “A checkout operator at Waitrose supermarket saved the company over £160,000 in reduced paper costs just by eliminating blank spaces on the receipt! With all the change that Covid-19 has forced on us, imagine how a few simple employee ideas could lead to working smarter.”

Our new survey will help you assess your current innovation process, from idea generation through to successful implementation and application of innovation throughout your organisation.

Interested? Current Engagement Multiplier clients can access Kickstarting Innovation in the On-Demand Library, which is accessible via their dashboard. If you’re new to us, one of our team can assist you with adding the Innovation survey to a free Benchmark Assessment. Simply register for a free trial, and tell our representative you’d like to add the Innovation survey to the Benchmark.