When you find out where your organization is strongest at encouraging innovation, you can work to build on those strengths. As example, most organizations value ideas--find ways to be sure that more of them get implemented. You can help to improve your idea generation, idea receptivity and project launch processes. Invent a new idea banking system, facilitate idea sessions for co-workers, start an "idea-flash" newsletter, invent the "Match Game" ways to correlate ideas to your corporate goals and objectives, initiate an adhoc team for a favorite project and create a model for other idea champions. Or, organize an "idea fair" such as Nortel Network's Share and Discover event.

If your organization values people and trusts and respects employees, you can find ways to encourage collaboration and communication among departments and cross functional teams. Look for synergies with co-workers and develop them into on-going collaborations, hold brainstorming meetings with a wide variety of people, lead the charge for training in creative problem solving and creative thinking, encourage your co-workers to "advertise" their good ideas and look for partners or sponsors for implementation, initiate new channels of company-wide communication such as daily email broadcasts, threaded messaging, or a weekly newsflash.

If Learning is valued, look for new ways to spread the lessons learned from both success and failure. Review "lessons in progress" during the course of projects, ask management for stories of success and failure that encourage risk-taking and empowerment, start an award for "nice tries," organize and archive lessons learned for future reference, initiate "share fairs" where people can pass on key learnings from recent outside trainings, watch for the lessons of competitors or other businesses that you can learn from vicariously, create informal forums where learnings can be shared widely--like the gong at The Neenan Company.

Creating an innovative culture does bear heavily on inspired leadership.

• At GSD&M, an extraordinary advertising firm, their core values are literally carved in stone--in the floor of their lobby. Among those values...Curiosity. They say, "there has to be a better way."
• Jack Kahl, CEO of Manco used to swim the chilly company pond with employees who were recent heroes or extraordinary contributors. When he felt he could no longer hazard the pond, he followed through on his promise to have his head shaved at the company meeting if the firm met sales goals.
• At Cirque du Soleil's mission is simply stated and easy to rally around:

"Invoke the imagination

Provoke the senses

Evoke emotion"

While top management can and should inspire the organization to grab the golden ring, culture truly depends on how individuals embrace the organization's values and behave in alignment with those values. Anyone can be an innovation leader if they choose to act in a way that encourages others to move their ideas forward, creates extraordinary collaboration, and is proactive in his or her own pursuit of new skills for creativity and innovation.

So, if you're searching for an innovative culture, perhaps you should look no further than your own. Use the Innovation DNA model as a guide to identify your innovation process and culture strengths, and build on them. Start small and easy-try a small project within your own workgroup. Share the model with others and find other innovation champions to help you enhance your entire organization's receptivity to ideas and to support their implementation.