Business leaders not doing enough to foster innovation, say Millennials

While the Millennial generation values innovation in an employer, only 26 percent of those surveyed in the Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (DTTL) Millennial Survey believe their current organization’s leaders encourage practices that foster innovation. But, 78 percent of the world’s future business leaders believe that innovation is essential for business growth.

“Innovation at the institutional level is needed to sufficiently shift an organization’s mindset to allow new ideas to truly emerge and thrive,” said a statement from Deloitte Global CEO Barry Salzberg. “While our current business leaders can debate how and where to innovate, it’s clear how much importance our future leaders place on innovation—not just as a driver of business growth but also as a catalyst for solving society’s most pressing problems.”

DTTL surveyed close to 5,000 Millennials from 18 countries. When gauging the perception among future leaders about innovation and its impact on society, 84 percent say business innovations have a positive impact on society, and 65 percent feel their own company’s activities benefit society in some way.

The business community is regarded as playing a lead role in developing innovations that will benefit society. Almost half of the respondents (45 percent) believe business drives the innovations that most positively impact society, compared to government (18 percent) and academic bodies (17 percent).

Innovation is also an important component of talent recruitment and retention. Two-thirds of the Millennials surveyed say innovation is a key factor in making an organization an employer of choice. This is particularly relevant to many companies, attracting the ever-growing number of Millennials, who are forecasted to make up 75 percent of the world’s workforce by 2025.

However, discrepancies were found when Millennials were asked about the requirements for innovation:

• 39 percent of respondents believe that encouragement and rewards for idea generation and creativity is a requirement for innovation to occur, whereas only 20 percent say their current organization operates in this way.
• 34 percent say providing employees with free time to dedicate to learning and creativity is key to an innovative environment, versus 17 percent who characterize their workplace that way.
• 32 percent consider openness and the freedom to challenge as key to innovation, versus 17 percent who say this is visible in their organizations.
• 42 percent believe in the importance of encouraging innovative thinking at all levels of the organization, versus 26percent who describe their places of employment that way.

“A generational shift is taking place in business as baby boomers, many of whom may have been wedded to the ‘old way’ of doing business, begin to step down from their leadership roles to retire,” said Salzberg. “Real opportunity exists for organizations to step up and create the conditions and commitment needed to encourage and foster innovation in their work environments. And there’s a tremendous upside if we get this right: we can better retain talent, remain more competitive into the future, and more positively impact society.”

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