Entrepreneurial culture and attitude is a must for every company to innovate and grow because every single person can contribute for growth of the company. Entrepreneurial culture helps employees in understanding of business and it changes their approach to work and equips them in becoming more successful.
Entrepreneurial employees exist in every company but the cumbersome process and lackadaisical approach in terms of process and procedures in companies by leaders serve as an impediment to innovation and entrepreneurism. So a culture and mindset to think beyond their existing functional domain should be appreciated.
Legendary Management Guru peter Drucker in his book on” Innovation and Entrepreneur” advocates that small and medium companies created more jobs than big corporations in North America and Canada, which were started by entrepreneurs from diverse industries and he further states that these companies and industries never existed before two decades. He suggests companies to be flexible, adaptive to change, creative and above all to be entrepreneurial which a combination of all. Peter Drucker enumerates key strategies to be followed by manager to make companies highly successful.
- Managers who want to encourage innovation must develop the skills and techniques to handle people in a different manner. Because it is easy to change the mindset of a person instead of changing the whole organization.
- He further asks managers to always turn unforeseen success or failures into organizations advantage.
And he summarizes that opportunity for innovation lies in external environment in the form of demographical change, change in perception and mood, and different way of thinking apart from knowledge. William hill the betting company had a big leap in its growth owing to better use of information technology. When others are reluctant to spend big on IT they dared to spend, which is a classic example of innovation. Employees should be encouraged to think in an innovative manner so that an atmosphere for entrepreneurial skills will flourish. Whereby in most companies absence of culture blocks innovative culture among employees.
View on innovation
Expertise for innovation Exists in Big, Small and Traditional companies but all of them are equipped with their own problems. Big companies have easy access to funding, talent, market etc but procedural delays and to think beyond their industry is a cut out task because of their huge size and are not inclined to take risk. Smaller companies lack innovative skills due to size, resource crunch, culture and lack of infrastructure etc.
Every company has thousands of ideas to innovate and there is absolutely no paucity on innovation by companies irrespective of size. Generally the process in companies are structured in developing a particular product where by innovation requires an out of box mindset to think beyond the industry where they are operating. Typical example is Apple, which lost its market share significantly in computers, came out with a stunning product in the form of I pad and I phones, which altered the face of music and communication industry. This single innovation, which then multiplied into many products, has significantly improved the profit and growth of the Musical industry. One way of doing innovation is to enter a sector where the company’s existing business model is not at stake.
The catalyst to move ahead
- Encourage conversation: Companies should encourage more conversation across hierarchies so that it helps in building new ideas.
- Diversity: Diversity brings up innovative ideas, open to face challenges, increased competition and it leads in better results
- Staff mobilization and encouragement: All stakeholders should be educated and aware of pros and cons of innovation. Irrespective of results strong culture for innovation should be nurtured in companies
- Research Situation: Create situations and scenarios like how the companies will face competition in short-term, long term and encourage employees to act upon it and devise mechanism to face the uncertain future with confidence.
- Look for funding: Countries across the world allocate fund and encourage entrepreneurs to innovate .so companies has to look out for funding options to foster innovation.