Ways You Can Innovate at Work Every Single Day
2 min. read
During the 2023 Refresh Week Expo a majority of us stated that this year we are focusing on COMMUNICATION & INNOVATION! Last week we shared tips to become a better communicator. This week, let's take a minute to learn some innovation tips!
The opportunity to innovate is something most of us want more of in our daily work lives. Yet often, we feel we can’t be more creative at work because of factors beyond our control. Below are some tips almost anyone can adopt to keep your innovation muscles strong and ready to go.
Surround Yourself With Inspiration
Whenever you see something from the big wide world that captures your attention, put it on display. It can be any discovery: an awesome ad in a magazine, an unusually arranged menu, or even a well-written email that made you laugh.
Get a Buddy
Innovation rarely happens in a vacuum. Pick a colleague you feel comfortable with with and make yourselves accountable to each other. Encourage each other to keep trying new things. Whether it’s trying a new place for lunch, pitching an idea in an unorthodox manner, sharing articles that inspire, or just doing some old-fashioned brainstorming. It’s better—and easier—together.
Pick Small Projects
We often think that ideas must always be big, transformative, and game-changing. But often, it’s lots of small, novel things that add up to make a huge difference. The benefits to small-scale innovation are huge. Not only do they happen quickly and (most often) without a lot of fuss, they also garner the interest and attention of both your team and organization; thus paving the way for bigger, meatier innovation projects to follow.
Flip Your Assumptions
We all have things we do with our eyes shut. It’s part of what makes us excel at our jobs, but also part of what blinds us to opportunities. Over the course of the day, identify all the tasks you do without thinking. Take a moment to talk about how you could do them differently. Sometimes it won’t work (spell check might always be the best way to proofread your work). However, it will often lead you to find a new way of doing the same old thing.
These tricks may seem trivial, but together they force you to see the world in a new way. And that’s what innovation is all about—seeing opportunity where no one else can. The more you practice these, the more easily it will become your default way of thinking—and the more innovation will become part of your daily work.
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