Propelling Innovation: The People, Culture, and Process Imperatives

Navigating new demands as a small or medium business (SMB) can feel like weathering a storm in a rowboat. As new waves of technologies advance, customer expectations continue to peak. To stay afloat, you need to keep rising to each new challenge and evolving your product or service to keep from rocking the boat. The journey therefore relies on resilience, proactive problem-solving, adaptability, and smart risk-taking to reach business goals and destinations.

Recent data shows that 73 percent of customers expect better personalization as technology advances, and 65 percent expect companies to adapt to their changing needs and preferences, demonstrating that customers constantly seek improvements to offerings and experiences. As such, embracing innovation is vital to steering success in a competitive business landscape.

But amid a sea of slings and arrows, it’s important not to get swept away by technology-first thinking. Innovation isn’t born in a vacuum; it’s the result of a vibrant ecosystem of people who are empowered to think differently, cultures that reward reinvention and processes that turn ideas into scalable impact. By focusing on these three areas, businesses will be better equipped to scale new products and services quickly and maximize customer value.

The human engine of innovation

Digital tools play an important role in driving innovation, but they are just an empty vessel without your people at the helm. The right team doesn’t just get you from A to B though. They proactively seek out ways to explore uncharted territories and are emotionally invested in the innovation journey. As Amazon’s president and CEO Andy Jassy observed, “Innovation comes from people who are willing to question commonly held assumptions and think outside of the box.”

However, the reality is that many people find innovation outside their comfort zone, despite much of the discourse focusing on fun and creativity. The rising tide of challenges can stop even top talent from pursuing new ways to boost customer experiences and streamline solutions. Often this comes from a misconception that innovation means monumental change when small and continuous improvements can actually be even more transformative.

If employees are encouraged to change their attitude to risk-taking, they can open their eyes to new possibilities and solutions that others may have missed. Confronting anxieties towards change and building self-awareness helps to develop emotional intelligence (EQ) that can be harnessed for innovation. This is crucial when a study has proven that EQ in leaders is a better indicator of future success than existing competencies or intelligence quotient (IQ). Strong social skills pave the way for building relationships across disciplines, influencing stakeholders, and rallying others behind new concepts.

Creating a company culture of curiosity

A technology transformation goes hand in hand with a cultural transformation, because innovation isn’t just an individual effort. When the whole organization is on board with continuous learning and fresh thinking, businesses build a force for positive change. An all-hands-on-deck approach to experimentation isn’t just a costly endeavor exclusive to large enterprises either. Organizations don’t even have to spend any money; it’s about reframing it as a growth mindset.

Once business leaders foster a sense of psychological safety with their team members, they can inspire individuals to go beyond their day-to-day roles and become captains of the company’s success. This is corroborated by research, which found that psychological safety is the greatest factor for high performance and innovation. Progress and learning come from fostering a work environment that encourages teams to challenge each other, identify weak spots, raise concerns, and admit mistakes without worry of punishment.

However, it’s important to distinguish that innovation is unleashed from staying hyper-focused on external customer needs, rather than internal challenges. Just look at Amazon’s Day 1 culture and operating model. It taps into this mentality of rewarding curiosity, obsessing over customers, and boldly experimenting to meet their needs. On the other hand, Day 2 culture often sets in as companies grow over time and impacts agility with slow decision-making.

Equals Money, a rapidly expanding payment platform, is realizing its global growth ambitions by instilling this mindset across all levels of it teams. Its empathetic leadership team and ethos of never standing still prevents complacency and inspires innovation. Even as it has grown from 6 team members to over 450, the business continues make space for everyone’s diverse perspectives. And by working with AWS through innovation and transformation initiatives, Equals Money is also able to maintain an unwavering focus on customers.

Taking a curious mindset extends to embracing external trends too. However, it’s important not to get caught up in the latest technological advancements. Grounding your business in the customer’s needs and figuring out how technologies can solve them will help you navigate success.

Anchoring ideas into impact

While people and culture build the grounds for innovation, structured mechanisms enable concepts to reliably turn into productized solutions. For example, Amazon’s Customer Obsession Leadership Principle guides teams to invent on customers’ behalf. It’s about working backwards from customer needs and getting close enough to understand their desires—even when they don’t or can’t articulate them.

Effective frameworks stop your business getting distracted by too-early discussions of requirements and keep the focus on a singular vision aligned with end-user value. For instance, Amazon’s Press Release and Frequently Asked Questions (PRFAQ) processes help solidify visions into tangible outcomes. Teams start by drafting a future press release envisioning desired customer experiences from new product initiatives. The narrative is then supported with extensive PRFAQs to systematically capture and reconcile assumptions, risks, and open-ended questions.

These practices aren’t just for large global enterprises like Amazon. Nor do processes have to be complex or resource-intensive. While Amazonian documents typically contain around 30 PRFAQs, SMBs can strip it back with three consistent external questions and three internal questions they always ask themselves and use a more repeatable, scalable template they just fill in. They can then pressure-test hypotheses through real customer conversations. This can be a lifeline for confronting presumptions early, and preventing your business from blindly building solutions that lack product-market fit.

Making innovation your destination

When heightened customer expectations and technology advances show no sign of slowing, the relentless drive for innovation remains key to relevance. Ultimately, establishing a thriving innovation practice is a multi-faceted challenge. It’s about curating talent with the emotional intelligence and resilience to embrace change. It requires intentionally shaping a culture of experimentation, agility, and customer obsession. And it hinges on proven processes to transform raw ideas into solutions with tangible value.

While a holistic approach is what propels human-centric innovation, there are plenty of ways you can put it into practice. If you’d like to learn more about putting people, culture, and process at the heart of your strategies, explore on-demand insights in the AWS Connected Community. Or, if you’re new to the cloud, get guidance from experts on AWS Cloud and see how it can help your business unleash innovation.