JOMO KENYATTA UNIVERSITY OF AGRICULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY

COLLEGE OF HUMAN RESOURCE AND DEVELOPMENT

BACHELOR OF BUSINESS INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY

MANAGEMENT.

NAME: NDEGWA ABIGAEL WANJIRU

REGISTRATION NO: HDE216-0726/2020

 INTRODUCTION

Cisco is a multinational company best known for manufacturing networking technology. In

Kenya, it is part of the government of Kenya's digital jobs initiative. This has allowed many
young people to get an avenue to launch their career in technology. The Cisco Networking
Academy has transformed lives around the world. When working for Cisco, you'll get a stock
purchase plan, an attractive paid off-time plan among other perks. Whether you're interested in
the Internet of Everything (IoE), a woman interested in technology, or you are marketing savvy,
you should consider working for Cisco. In this report, we will discuss how to introduce a robust
innovative team and the features that are needed to facilitate innovation, using Cisco as a case
study.

Innovation culture is the work environment that leaders cultivate in order to nurture unorthodox
thinking and its application. Workplaces that foster a culture of innovation generally subscribe to
the belief that innovation is not the province of top leadership but can come from anyone in the
organization.

How to build an innovation culture

Here are the top ten methods that you can apply in building a culture of innovation within your
organization:

1. Determine your goals

Before you can encourage your employees to work together on a certain project, your goals and
target results must be clear and precise. Get them to align their thoughts and strategies on a
single objective. Watch different ideas collide and listen to different perspectives.

2. Encourage people to think outside the box

Show your team that you value unconventional thinking. Remind them during your
brainstorming sessions that there are no bad ideas, that relevant discussions may arise from their
suggestions, and that suggestions for improvement are always welcome.

3. Be genuinely interested in their opinions

Motivate your team members to share their thoughts on various issues that your company is
facing. Promote idea sharing, thorough discussion, and collaboration in devising solutions that
you can use to respond to these challenges.

4. Conduct innovation workshops

Raise awareness about the importance of innovation in a company. Promote the involvement of
your employees by conducting innovation workshops across all hierarchy levels. Explain to them
what their roles are and make them understand how significant their contributions can be.

5. Create idea challenges

Encourage everyone to share their ideas by creating fun idea challenges. Form a committee of
experts to evaluate the feasibility of every presented concept. You can also apply gamification
features to make this competition more exciting for all the participants.

6. Don’t forget about the rewards

Building an innovation culture includes rewarding and recognizing innovative behavior. Offer
raises and promotions to employees who consistently provide creative and feasible concepts.
Celebrate innovation efforts and commend innovation teams for a job well done.

7. Provide constructive feedback

Don’t be so quick in turning down ideas. Discuss them with the rest of the team and find out if
you can improve them. If not, provide constructive feedback and acknowledge the effort (and the
courage) exhibited to present it.

8. Train your team to think like entrepreneurs

When you encourage your employees to think like they own the business, great things can
happen — and one of them is when they get to develop a mindset that supports continuous
innovation and business development.

9. Avoid unnecessary bureaucracy

Bureaucracy leads to lag times and organizational churn that decelerates innovation. It places
roadblocks on innovators and causes unwarranted frustration. Abstain from any form of
bureaucracy and support rapid experimentation all the time.

10. Discourage silos

Innovation needs a group of diverse people who can provide new and unique perspectives on
existing challenges. Encourage people across functional teams to work together within a given
period.
The importance of innovation culture

Innovation culture is made up of practices that support and strengthen innovation as a significant
aspect of progress and growth. It includes all structures, habits, processes, instructions, pursuits,
and incentives that institutions implement to make innovation happen.

It values, drives, and supports innovative thinking in order for it to be successful on an

organizational level. To fully understand the importance of your company’s innovation culture
you need to know how this impacts what employees do or say at work every day.

This will help establish specific behaviors within the organization such as communication
patterns between departments during meetings or who gets credit for new ideas when they come
about.

Conclusion
Engineering the perfect team is more subjective than we would like but focusing on these five co
mponents increases the likelihood that you will build a dream team. Google found that teams wit
h psychologically safe environments had employees who were less likely to leave, more likely to 
harness the power of diversity, and ultimately, who was more successful.