Nine ideas that will help you build a culture of innovation

How do you build a company culture that nurtures game-changing ideas? Start with mindset, feedback and failure

In the mid-1960s, NASA was abuzz. A few years earlier, president John F. Kennedy had challenged the agency to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. A large swathe of its more than 400,000 employees were working on fulfilling that goal.

However, that meant that when California Institute of Technology graduate student Gary Flandro arrived at the agency’s doors, no one really knew what to do with him. He was stuck in a corner office and given the task of finding the most efficient way to send spacecraft to the outer planets.

While working on the project, he discovered that in the late 1970s Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune would line up – a phenomenon that only happens once every 176 years. Such alignment meant a spacecraft could use the gravity of one planet to "slingshot" to the next, saving fuel and time. Flandro realised this made it possible to visit all four planets in a single mission, something that had never been tried before.

Thanks to his breakthrough, NASA launched the Voyager missions in 1977. Voyager 2 took advantage of this rare alignment and visited all four planets, sending back amazing data and pictures. But this sort of breakthrough doesn’t happen without a culture of innovation: one that embraces honest feedback, sees the value of diversity, encourages self-awareness and is forgiving of failure.

“I’d love to speak to Flandro’s manager,” says Jeremy Kourdi, co-author of the book 50 Ideas that Changed the World of Work. “Could there be a Gary Flandro in your organisation?”

Kourdi and co-author Jonathan Besser’s book summarises and explains the business concepts and ideas that have changed the world of work. It looks at everything from Sun Tzu's Art of War to fundamentals like emotional intelligence, psychological safety and flow, and techniques such as SWOT, PEST and GROW.

What Besser and Kourdi have done is lay out a menu that leaders can choose from to create a super strategy. Here, we focus on how to create and nurture a culture of innovation.

“When I started out more than 30 years ago, innovation was all about new products,” says Kourdi. “Now, it's also about new processes and ways of working efficiently. It's about new business models as well and disrupting industries.”