Culture Innovation and Building Sustainable Competitive Value

By Yemi Omitola

10^th October 2023

The mouths of corporate champions and business leaders have found it easy to pontificate innovation as the way to go in their search for competitive advantage.  It appears that innovation must be articulated loudly in business narratives of executives whether in communication with customers, corporate literatures, engagement with shareholders or business media. The idea is that if you are not heard speaking innovation, critical stakeholders might not take you seriously.  However, speaking innovation and doing innovation is different sides of a coin.

For those firms that are doing innovation, the evidence is shown in the new product or service they launch into the market. It could also be a reconfiguration or repackaging of the existing offering with addition of new features. Many firms prioritize process innovation where they recreate the way structural components that make up their value delivery. But a particular strand of innovation critically stands between your business and sustainable competitive value. The real deal is Culture innovation.

Corporate culture shapes the corporate DNA that facilitate beliefs, ideologies and rituals that constantly engineer new way of looking at problems and solving them. In fact, your organisation culture determines and shapes your perception of the world and people. It informs your perspectives about what is possible or what is not. Show me a business that constantly win big in the marketplace, I would point out the role of corporate culture in the scheme of things.

If you really want to play at the bleeding edge of innovation, your corporate culture should be designed to activate practice of innovation. If your organisation places premium on culture innovation, the whole architecture of your business system, processes and habits would champion disruptive thinking and churning out ideas with high tolerance for failure while creating and delivering values to the marketplace. Culture innovation is undertaken when you design your corporate culture to firmly support and nurture creativity as your internal philosophy. Innovation would serve as a yardstick to guide your decisions when it comes to processes, procedures, investment, procurement, team building, management behaviour, leadership orientation, communications and every other undercurrent ideal that defines your corporate manifestation.

When culture innovation is activated, innovative culture becomes prevalent and permeates every nook and cranny of the firms. People begins to explore and experiment with new thinking that can deliver world-changing ideas. It becomes easy to bring to life innovative products and services that can engender disruption or create new market categories. It all start from your culture that champions the act of challenging the status quo.

Therefore, culture innovation should be at the core of how you build and nurture a winning business. It calls for revisiting and reviewing the cultural molecules and framework that shape what you do, why you do what you do and how you do it. It is the feeling, spirit and social nuances that make your organisation to be what it is- a business that lives, breathes and supports innovation.

About Yemi Omitola

Yemi is the founder/Tribe Chief of Kukumba Tribe, a movement of creative entrepreneurs and innovation mavericks. He creates and delivers extra-value solutions at the intersection of Innovation design, Creative technology, and Brand expression. He supports startups and underdog entrepreneurs, especially ethnic-minority businesses in diaspora markets.