Innovating Human Capital Management? Yes!

At the mention of the word “innovation” your mind might conjure up images of lab-coated geniuses navigating high-tech laboratories and designing the latest smart phone or computer tablet. While most leaders understand the importance of innovation, many acknowledge that their organizations are not effective at managing it.

Although product development and technology are the most synonymous connotations, innovation can have a much broader reach across an organization, even impacting business performance through people practices. Yes—“people practices”—you know, those practices organizational leaders develop, implement, and track to ensure that their people (or human capital) are positively impacting their businesses.

Recently, the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) released “Human Capital Practices that Drive Innovation”, a study revealing keys to improving organizational effectiveness in eight different types of innovation, and detailing how these different types can be promoted through practices used in top-performing organizations.

The study includes insight on the innovative practices at Qualcomm, 3M, Flextronics, Proctor and Gamble, and other top performing organizations. The study findings illustrate that innovation in human capital and talent management is often overlooked, but is strongly correlated to market performance–which suggests that leaders in both HR AND the C-suite should pay close attention.

The findings conclude that the main contribution HR leaders can make is putting practices into place that build a workforce with innovation skills, and an environment that fosters and enables creativity and new ideas:

“The message from this research is a bad news/good news scenario. The bad news is that to be a high market performer, a company needs to be adept at all types of innovation. The good news is that organizations that apply a set of key human capital practices holistically can excel at any type of innovation.”

The full study is only available to i4cp’s member network; nonmembers can register online to view “Human Capital Practices that Drive Innovation”–a complimentary on-demand webinar in which i4cp researchers discuss the top 10 human capital practices that high-performing organizations use to increase innovation.

image credit: theleadersbrand.com

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Dr. Tony Bolden is the Chief Evangelist of The Leader’s Brand. He’s a Sales Professional, Speaker, Trainer, Facilitator, and Organizational Behavior Blogger. Tony earned an MBA in Organizational Psychology and Development, and a Doctorate of Management in Organizational Leadership.