The Innovation Consultant
Does Four15 have an established culture of innovation?
The innovation culture of Four15 is rather very simple, they live to innovate, mostly focusing on the Mexican culture. Four15 has a relatively established culture of innovation as they make it a goal every month to encourage their employees to come up with innovative ideas that will benefit the organisation in the long run. Four15 takes the values, norms, subtle behaviours of leaders and employees and unconscious messages into great consideration as these aspects can shape or break the culture of any business. The organisation strongly believes that the power of a strong culture will drive the business to success. Four15 has developed an environment that allows creative thinking to take place, this results in new or improved processes, products, ideas and services.
Does leadership cultivate a culture of innovation?
Companies with the best ideas have the ability to improve, create and adapt to rapid change, and this is what distinguishes the leaders from followers (Halogen Software Talent Management Blog, 2017). The leadership style that Four15 practices is participative, this type of style allows input from employees on the decision making process of the organisation. The leaders of Four15 aim to cultivate a culture of innovation by fostering generativity, they put a lot of time in coaching, connecting, mentoring and developing their staff. They challenge their employees thinking skills, strategies and behaviours through the lens of innovation. Listening deeply and questioning the staff of Four15 is also a way that leadership uses to cultivate a culture of innovation, they encourage asking extra questions to challenge everyone to go deeper and stretch further. Constant inquiry and questions form the linguistics of innovation (Forbes.com, 2017).
What are Four15’s main drivers of innovation?
Keeping things fresh is one of the main drivers of innovation for the organisation. Four15 ensures that they have the best leaders to foster innovation within the workplace, leading the employees in a creative and innovative way. This encourages the employees to follow the footsteps of their leader, to be innovative and creative. The staff of the organisation also plays a big role in driving innovation in the workplace as more ideas are introduced by multiple employees. The feedback from the organisations customers also drives innovation as customers can assist Four15 with new ideas and solutions that will improve the brand.
What are Four15’s main barriers/ enablers?
Barriers:
Leadership: The biggest barrier to innovation is the leader/ manager not being open to new ideas. Also, leaders who shoot down and discourage new ideas before comprehensively considering the idea, leads to demotivated employees and silencing of new ideas. The leadership at Four15 is a barrier as communication is very seldomly done with employees. However, sometimes there is more of an autocratic leadership style which therefore lessens the space for innovation at Four15.
Time and resources: Not being allocated enough time to actively engage with innovation, employees focus rather on their regular work than to spend time coming up with new ideas. At Four15 employees are focused more on keeping up with the culture (the theme of the restaurant) and therefore lack the time to focus on innovation.
Four15 identifies the unavailability of products in South Africa that are essential to run a Mexican Burrito Bar as a barrier for innovation.
The lack of a proper social media image is also a main barrier for Four15 as this leads to less brand awareness. In a world where technology and social media are evolving every day, it is important for brands such as Four15 to be updated with the latest social media.
Enablers:
Customer insight: Four15 rely on feedback from consumers and therefore when their customer gets the bill, they are required to give their feedback about the brand.
People and culture: Four15 is based on a Mexican culture, however they bring some South African culture into the brand in order for their customers to relate and to satisfy their needs.
Research and development: Companies must strike a careful balance between local relevance and global scale. Four15 have done sufficient research in keeping up with the Mexican culture but adapting it to South Africa, thus creating a great enabler for innovation.
Four15 is a unique restaurant in South Africa and therefore developing ideas for innovation is much easier for them than other restaurants.
5 Ways Four15 can improve:
Here are practices of innovation that Four15 can implement:
Collaboration and share knowledge by using technology: social media can be used to gather people together and to send messages to a wide range of audiences, while collaborative drives innovation and creativity.
Train for creativity: encourage employees to develop creative thinking skills by funding training programs to develop them
Create an "Idea-finding" program: build a system that taps into the collective knowledge of everyone and lets everyone promote good ideas (Burkus, 2017).
Have a leadership team that inspires ideas
Reward innovation: enhances the employees motivation to do better than before
