Innovation isn’t entirely a science, but it’s not purely art, either. As business leaders figure out the best ways to inspire their employees to be creative, sharp companies are also learning how to use process, metrics, and culture to consistently produce and nurture new ideas.

Some of these lessons include:

• Using simplicity as a principle to sharpen innovation
• Making better and more substantive partnerships based on trust
• Encouraging early experiments with emerging technologies (and providing the autonomy to do so)
• Getting real about a company’s atmosphere and the opportunities it affords

Learn more about how to innovate with authority in the SAP Insights coverage below.

Build an innovation mindset and culture

Go with the flow. Creativity requires a state of mind that is open to new ideas. One central component: achieving “flow,” a state of consciousness in which we lose ourselves in focus and feel and perform at our best. On the corporate level, this is possible by fostering a climate of sharing goals, taking collective risks, engaging in active, listening, and encouraging equal participation.

Get into a state of flow by reading “Thinkers: Biohacking Your Work Culture.”

Master early adopter tactics. Innovation entails risk, and companies that are effective at adopting early technology understand how to manage risk with proven processes and metrics. Strategies for success in this area include building a culture that prioritizes learning, gives explorers autonomy and independence, avoids getting bogged down in pilots, and follows the evidence. Another winning play: experimenting and collaborating with customers.

Uncover the secrets to innovating with early technology in “How to Get the Early Adopter Edge.”

Get simpler. Needlessly complex processes can rob employees of precious time to think and innovate. The antidote: simplify, simplify, simplify. For companies, this means rewarding doing or managing less, eliminating redundancies, and getting rid of superfluous rules. It also means encouraging employees to take more responsibility for their decisions. The goal should be minimal, understandable, repeatable, and accessible processes.

Learn the benefits of simplification in “Ridding Work of the Busy Complex.”

Provide low-code tools. Technology is central to modern business innovation, but sometimes the quickest way to pilot or expand an idea doesn’t have to involve IT at all. Given the right tools and circumstances, rank-and-file employees can carry the torch. These “citizen developers” can be serious agents of innovation, as long as they understand that their low-code or no-code efforts will have the greatest effect if they operate within some pre-established rules.

Get comfortable equipping businesspeople to code by reading “Unleash Your Citizen Developers—With Guardrails.”

Learn to extract the best from AI. When armed with AI, your teams can spin out dozens or hundreds of ideas for new products or services. Many of those ideas, alas, will stink. Human and machine will need to work together to zero in on the concepts with the best potential and determine how to improve the chance of success even further.

Find strategies for prompting, refining, and evaluating AI-generated ideas in “How to Lean on GenAI for New Product Ideas.”

Use different metrics

Apply a portfolio of innovation-specific metrics. Successful innovation requires assessing investments and using metrics to decide whether to keep pursuing any given idea—or stop. This goes beyond simply measuring immediate financial impact. It incorporates benchmarking conditions conducive to innovation, measuring qualitative impact, identifying the most innovative business units, and tracking the idea pipeline. While measuring innovation is difficult, a well-designed metrics regimen can support flexible thinking and nurture ideas that need time and iteration.

Learn more about how to assess innovation in “Innovation Metrics: Figure Out Which Projects to Pursue.”

Create measures of intangible value. Much of the real value of business today—employee and customer trust, employee and customer loyalty, the power of ideas, and a culture of innovation and problem-solving—is hard to measure. Judy Samuelson of the Aspen Institute says it’s important to measure value in a way that captures the perspective of employees, customers, suppliers, partners, and the communities a business serves.

Lean into a different spin on value in “The Superpower of Business: Solving Problems.”

But also, avoid metrics overload. There’s a balance to be struck. Some experts say over fixating on metrics can stunt creativity. The argument: metrics quantify what already exists, while entrepreneurship and innovation require vision and risk. For that reason, it’s important to keep human judgment in the mix.

Read more about the potential downside of data in “Stop Metrics Mania.”

Plug in your whole business network

Partner better. More than 90% of technology executives say innovation partnerships are an essential part of their innovation strategies. But not all of these duos are created equal. The most productive partnerships are those in which corporates offer more than funding, startups understand their value, both parties work together, and everyone comes out stronger in the end.

Find the recipe for stronger partnerships in “How Startups Can Maximize Their Partnership with Corporates.”

Build supply chain trust. Manufacturers and their networks of partners are desperately seeking more supply chain resiliency, flexibility, and sustainability. While most companies turn to technology to lead the way, supply chain innovation hinges more on trust. Experts agree that better data-sharing and mutually beneficial relationships are puzzle pieces for putting together supply chain projects that work.

Discover more about these partnerships in “Supply Chain Innovation: What’s Next?”

Rethink your assumptions (often)

Map your value proposition. A Wardley Map is an open-source tool that allows leaders to take a comprehensive look at their operations and, more critically, how it’s changing over time. These maps can help leaders make intelligent decisions about how a company creates value for customers, where to invest resources, what innovations may be demanded by market changes in the near term, and more.

Glean insight from Simon Wardley himself on mapping your business and your competitive environment in “A Landscape View into Value Chain Relationships.”

Find hidden value in current operations. To get more than just incremental returns on investment, companies need to combine technology with a new way of thinking about what value is and where to find it. When applied judiciously, this innovative “capacity capture” mindset can extract more value from existing assets and investments and encourage the development of potential new products, services, and business models.

Learn about this transformative strategy of maximizing efficiency in “Capacity Capture: A New Approach to Discovering Business Value.”