Motivation Management for Innovation

Section Title: Motivation Management for Innovation

Outline

1. What is motivation? Why is it important in innovation?

2. The Link Between Motivation and Innovation

3. Incentive schemes of motivation

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Section Title: Motivation Management for Innovation

There is an old saying you can take a horse to the water, but you cannot force it to drink. It will drink only if it's thirsty. So with different participants in the innovation process, they will do what they want to do or motivated to do. In this motivation management section, we will talk about how to encourage different participants and convince them with motivation. For example, the manager should be able to motivate employees. The leaders should provide powerful incentive to get support from shareholders.

1. What is motivation? Why is it important in innovation?

Motivation is what we call our driving force, our ''get up and go''. It stimulates our senses into the achievement of goals that have been set out for us. Its ability to shape the workforce into its own driving force is what becomes important to the success of work organizations [3].

Motivation and innovation output are positively correlated. The more motivated an individual, the more likely he or she is to engage in the task at various cognitive levels until an outcome is achieved.

Factors that make up motivation can be isolated, motivated and measured using standard quantitative techniques which allow a leader, consultant or manager to measure and improve motivation with a corresponding rise in creative output.

There are broad and specific categories of motivation [1]:

Intrinsic motivation – Intrinsically motivated people include commitment to work, passionate involvement, total absorption and devotion to their work, interest and satisfaction in their work, challenged by their work.

Extrinsic motivation – It is the motivation to engage in an activity primarily in order to meet some goal external to the work itself, such as attaining an expected reward, winning a competition or meeting some requirement.

2. The Link Between Motivation and Innovation

Employees in most organizations would like to feel that their ideas can make a difference in their workplace. For many people, there are few things more motivating than seeing the successful implementation of an idea they suggested. The scarcity of this motivational force may be one of the biggest reasons why so many company employees feel that they are powerless and unable to change the ''system'' [2]. All too often, supervisors overlook the possibility that their employees may be an untapped gold mine of good ideas.

[2] outlines five practices which represent an integrated approach to innovation and employee motivation that has proven to be very effective.

Get to know every employee
It is virtually impossible for a mid-level manager to motivate his/her employees without getting to know them.
Challenge them to improve the operation
Managers should give each employee a clear mandate in their work requirements to take a hard look at the whole operation and make recommendations for improvements.
''Customer for a day''
Have each employee be ''customer for a day'' to took at the operation from the client's point of view.
The great idea award
Find a way to reward or recognize employees whose suggestions help improve the operation.
Don't forget the implementation
The actual implementation of the great ideas generated by employees.

3. Incentive schemes of motivation

Standard pay-for-performance schemes that punish failures with low wages and termination may have adverse effects on innovation [4].

[4] shows that incentive schemes that motivate innovation are fundamentally different from standard pay-for-performance schemes.


[1] http://ezinearticles.com/?Creativity-and-Innovation-Management---Motivation&id=21417
[2] http://govleaders.org/motivation.htm
[3] http://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/7485.html
[4] 2009, motivation innovation book