PROCESS | Recognize, Reward & Celebrate
People do what they are incented to do. That is whole idea behind commissioned salespeople, piecework, or pay for performance. Research has shown that highly achieving innovative companies recognize and/or reward their people who contribute to their innovation efforts.
Recognition of the innovator is an integral component of a successful innovation program. Many innovation experts consider recognition as more effective than financial rewards or prizes. Therefore, non-financial recognition may be the most important element in fostering innovation.
In addition to recognition, innovation should be encouraged with a combination of non-monetary and monetary rewards. Non-monetary ones can involve greater autonomy, time off to work on special projects and additional developmental opportunities. Monetary rewards include bonuses, pay increases and promotions. The bottom line is that the often-overlooked area of non-monetary and monetary rewards serve to reinforce people focusing on innovation.
The third leg of encouraging personnel to focus on innovation is celebratory events. The area of celebrating an organization’s innovation successes—and the individuals and teams that led to them—is an often-neglected area. This step involves having regular events to celebrate an organization’s innovative achievements.
There are various ways to add the element of celebration and fun to an entity’s innovation efforts. These include live events, award ceremonies, and video-recorded broadcasts to the entire company highlighting its innovation successes.
We developed a unique way to add glamour and pizzazz to the celebration of an organization’s innovation initiative with our Corporate Shark Attack and Celebrity Shark Attack programs. The events use the organization’s executives or celebrities from the TV show, Shark Tank, to create celebratory events that add the fun factor to innovation and underscore that innovation is critical to an organization.
The Corporate Shark Attack and Celebrity Shark Attack programs can be used in various ways including kick-off events to underscore the beginning of a company’s innovation initiative, periodic events to recognize innovations during the year, or an annual gala event. Additionally, the events are video-recorded and broadcast to the company’s employees as a morale booster to stress the importance of innovation within the organization’s overall strategy.
What we do – We guide organizations how to most effectively utilize recognizing, rewarding and celebrating innovation to sustain and grow their innovation initiatives.
