How to Foster a Culture of Innovation in Your Tech Team

“Innovation is not born from the dream, innovation is born from the struggle.” – Simon Sinek, author in the tech and team-culture industry. 

Growing a culture of innovation with your tech team isn’t for the faint-hearted. It will stress-test your risk tolerance, your team’s creativity and inspiration, and its agency for taking ownership.

But if you succeed, even the highly-established tech giants will envy you. 

How can you do it? What can you learn from tech giants’ culture of innovation? What pitfalls should you avoid for your tech team to thrive?

Why does innovation matter in the tech industry?

It feels like yesterday when MySpace was a tech breakthrough in the communication and networking industry. Fast forward 20 years, and we have AI like ChatGPT, Bard, and You to do almost everything digitally for us. It’s all thanks to innovation. 

It’s what’s pushing companies to evolve and constantly push the boundaries of new market trends. It’s one of the do-or-die methods of staying relevant and maintaining your position in the market. 

Companies fostering the culture of innovation within their tech teams have:

• High growth and profitability — The more you invest in innovation and fearless experimentation of new products and services, the more likely you are to succeed in meeting your client’s needs.
• Improved efficiency with reduced costs — Innovating tech teams bring the best of both worlds. New approaches to normal operations are born. Time-wasting tasks are reduced.
• Better team bond and healthier work culture — Innovation brings teams together. Put a couple of developers and software engineers in a meeting room, give them 6 hours, and wait for the new ChatGPT to appear.

When to foster a culture of innovation 

But don’t get it twisted!

Innovation isn’t a straight input-this-output-that kind of process that happens overnight. It’s not just another marketing campaign with a launch and end date nor a PowerPoint you and your tech team will go through and be on your way.

Here’s the ugly truth: The nature of innovation and building a culture around it is not efficient! It’s a messy process filled with experimentation and passion. In order to foster a culture of innovation with your tech team, leaders need to ditch the old understanding of company culture and what it stands for. 

Is it going to be easy?! Hate to disappoint you, but that’s not the right question.

What you should be asking is: Is it going to be worth it to spend time and effort developing passion through experimentation and building a culture of innovation within your tech team? 

YES!

How tech giants foster innovation and what you can learn from them

Innovating team cultures sound sexy on paper. It’s the Playboy bunny most team leaders dream of having.

But what does it look like in real life? How do tech giants foster their culture of innovation? What can we learn from them? 

Here’s how tech giants do it: 

1. Amazon has a “Day One” philosophy — It emphasizes approaching every day as if it were the starting day of the company. It’s what puts the status quo to its knees, stimulates team members to work together, and forms innovative cultures within. 
2. Microsoft approaches innovation with the “Garage” program — A physical place designed for limitless and fearless experimentation. They also motivate their tech teams to collaborate with other departments and teammates with different backgrounds.
3. Netflix took innovation by the horns with its “Freedom and Responsibility” culture — by providing their teammates the ultimate freedom in decision-making, they dwarf their competitors. Encouraging them to come up with ways of improving user experience and taking the initiative of building new features, projects, and series, their culture of innovation becomes unstoppable!
4. Google puts its two cents on the “20% time” policy — Spending 20% of the time on projects that align with the company’s goals. It’s worth noting if the policy is immersed in myth, dragging a community of nay-sayers. But one thing is certain – Without it, Gmail, AdSense, and Maps wouldn’t exist.

5 dos when fostering innovation in your tech team

I’ll give you a little secret they won’t: Tech giants are the ninja masters of the law of diffusion of innovation or, as Simon loves to call it — The Bell Curve. 

You can’t foster a culture of innovation in your tech team simply by forming a traditional workshop, with a launch and end date. You also can’t build a culture with everybody. It’ll crash and burn in seconds!

Tech giants pulled it off with their tech teams by talking to 15% of their tech talent — the ones who were hyped up and what to bring change to their workplace.

Here’s what the team clockwork behind those 15% looks like:

1. Encourage experimentation — Experimentation isn’t only encouraged but desired, with a price tag. It has to be VOLUNTARY! You can not push it down your tech team’s throat with the hope of innovation spurring out.
2. Celebrating failure — Innovation is like shooting at a target blindfolded. You might hit or miss. Innovating tech teams love that sport, because they know new learning opportunities are born through failure without punishment. 
3. Foster collaboration — Don’t close your tech team in a workspace “dungeon” and only have them deal with techy stuff! Let them collaborate with different departments and teammates. It’s a fire-safe way of building strong company culture and high-performing tech teams.
4. Provide autonomy — When you approach any tech team with the mission of building a culture of innovation, you’ll have to allow them to go their own way, craft their projects and take ownership. Micromanagement, resistance to change, and stifling dissent are FORBIDDEN! 
5. Paving the road for continuous learning — Team leaders and company execs must know one thing about building a culture of innovation: The investment in your people never stops. For the culture to grow, continuous opportunities for training, career-building, projects, and conferences must exist!

TL;DR of this cultural peanut-butter-jelly sandwich

Dragging the ball-and-chain of traditional culture-building is exhausting. Take it off! Your company doesn’t need it.

Fostering a culture of innovation with your tech team is way better and pays off ten times, but it requires a 180-degree approach. 

For growth, profitability, reduced costs, efficiency, and strong team bonds to happen, companies must embrace taking risks, encourage experimentation, foster collaboration, and give autonomy. 

Without those components, your culture of innovation will feel like a peanut butter sandwich without jelly. Your tech team will become boring, soulless, and uninspired. And your company culture almost nonexistent.

Don’t let that happen!