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Innovation is the process of creating and implementing new ideas, products, services, or methods that are not only novel but also relevant, addressing real-world needs and challenges. It involves the practical application of creativity to generate value and improve existing systems, making a significant impact in various domains such as technology, business, AND society.
After you share your general goals and your specific area of innovation needs, we use our systems thinking approach to evaluate the current potential and possible blockages in order to maximize your creative abilities. It helps viewing all critical elements in your company as “dots”, be they key people, ideas, opportunities, customers etc. The lines connecting them reflect the relationship between these elements. When working together, we help you “connect all these dots” in a dynamic way in order to get one smooth flowing system. Sometimes it will also be about finding new dot’s that weren’t even in the picture before and finding ways to fit them into the system to create something even better!
When working on innovation, such as the ability to create relevant new products, services or indeed different ways of working, we first look for the creative abilities of the teams or individuals that are given this responsibility. Through playful exercises and simulations we want to find out if you and your team are able to see new opportunities, ideas or solutions, when there currently doesn’t seem to be any. Through a simple process, we identify where the team stands with regards to being able to live their creative abilities and amplify this by exposing them to new and completely different impulses, helping them to make new connections, now and in the future.
Helping individuals or entire teams to think outside of the box is essential, yet in itself not enough to innovate in an efficient and sustainable manner. If innovation is core to your company’s success and growth, the mindset of the entire organization needs to be open to it. Innovation brings disruption, consciously breaks existing structures and habits and often takes us outside of the comfort zone. All at the same time, we as humans have a natural respect and sometimes even aversion to change.
We turn this around, by helping you develop exercises, communication elements and prototyping tools to show everyone that innovation is nothing to be scared of, but actually a ton of fun! If you have ever experienced an existential crisis in your company, you will have probably seen how suddenly things work very differently. Everyone is sharp, knows what to do, cooperates in direct and uncomplicated ways and it all flows in the team. This crisis mode often brings out the best in us. However it is partially fuelled by adrenaline, is rather taxing on energy and is thus not a very sustainable state. During our work together, we want to bring out the benefits of crisis work, without generating the stress of a crisis.
Maybe counter to intuition, but innovation actually needs very clear rules and processes to flourish. You have creative team members, there is a general openness to innovate and change, yet no meaningful innovations ever hit the ground? We often see this phenomenon and in many cases the reasons for this are:
Setting the right stage for innovation to happen is very often underestimated. It takes a holistic approach and willingness to break paradigms as well as engrained structures and habits. When innovators want to innovate, we like for them to feel like their idea “is safe enough to try”. This means they have a mandate to do, but also the responsibility and awareness of how their action affects the rest of the organization. If the rules of engagement are clear to them and the boundaries and goals well communicated, then within those, they can fully unleash creativity and create the new.
Inflow was founded by Natacha and Alexander Neumann with a clear purpose in mind: To bring teams and nature back in flow.
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