How the culture of an organisation is essential for service innovation

Is it possible with for a company or a government to work with service innovation without a strong culture?

Involving costomer in a service innovations process require both knowledge and leadership. Many times it depends more on specific persons in the organisation if this process works. If this person is a leader there are good preconditions for a strong culture that can lay a foundation for service innovation.

I believe that a culture for service innovation needs to focus on the staff and a bottom up perspective. There are three important aspects to do so:

• a structure that encourage creativity
• preconditions for staff to be motivated and happy
• a strategy and model for service innovation (Gustafsson https://youtu.be/kb30Q8y0CFc)

A strong culture is a balance of feelings and structure. A culture that allow staff to try, take risks and fail sometimes. Hopefully taking risks will lead to brilliant results more than failure. An environment where people who never make mistaces don´t work hard enough. Involving customers and citizens will most certainly ad more risk to an organisation. In my mind this need strong leadership and a good working environment.

A strong culture needs a vision and goals so that people know what to do and where to go. One of the biggest motivations for people to work hard is a sence of mening. What is the purpose of our organisation? We have all heard the story of the three brick builders. A man walked by and asked What are you doing? The first one answered I´m laying bricks. The second one answered I´m building a wall. Finally the man asked the third builder, he smiled and said I´m buildning a cathedral.

Perhaps it is possible to work with service innovation without a strong culture, but I wouldn´t take that risk if I was a leader.