Identifying Your Innovation Machines

The word ‘innovation’ has quickly risen to the top of 2016’s business buzzword list. Featured in the new Australian budget, we’re finding out what it truly means to be innovative, and if it’s only entrepreneurs that hold the keys to innovative success.

Being innovative requires utilising the energetic idea creators within your business. These are the people who are committed to do everything they can to stand up to internal resistance without causing friction in the workplace. These are the innovators who know that failure and setbacks are an integral strength and part of the corporate ideas creation process. Some of them you know about, but more often than not, they operate undetected by the corporate radar. They are the ‘intrapreneurs’ of the business world.

In recent times, Landgate, Western Australia’s Government Land Authority and iinet, Australia’s second largest internet provider, sent their innovation teams to work out of Spacecubed for 12 months. Along with many other innovative teams working out of Spacecubed, coworking and intrapreneurship make for a productive partnership. 

Identifying intrapreneurs within your business is no easy task and it requires putting a few staple rules in place to coerce them from the creative dens in which they’re hiding.

1. Creative spaces inspire creative thought. Intrapreneurs thrive in new, exciting spaces where their ideas can resonate. They master navigating political and bureaucratic inertia and changing their environment aids this process.
2. Nurture your 'intrapreneurs'. It’s often said that innovation has been a challenge in the corporate world for fear of losing employees to competitors and to self-employment. However, 70% of successful entrepreneurs got their business ideas whilst working for a previous employer. So as a means of retaining talented individuals, intrapreneurs should be given the resources and creative license to conduct their intrapreneurship. Identifying this is a critical tool for growth.
3. Establish a well oiled innovation machine through creativity, change of environment and collaboration. Your intrapreneurs need space to grow and collaborate. When their ideas are operationalised by a management board, your company's potential for innovation will be reignited.

Spacecubed has been the innovation engine room of the Perth economy for the past 4 years, and FLUX will continue this endeavour when it opens in June.

Learn more about how you can get your team working alongisde Perth's brightest idea creators and kickstart your innovation machines at Spacecubed and FLUX.