The new age of work and team innovation

- The world of work is changing quickly and drastically. What people want from their working lives is changing. Now more than ever before, people want to work in roles with meaning, creativity, and flexibility. Digital transformation is making a huge impact on the economic landscape. Whether you are an individual working, or someone who's running a company, it's in your best interest to keep up with a new pace of work. And the best way to do that is to focus on innovation. For an organization to not only survive, but to thrive today, it needs to nurture a creative and innovative flare. If creativity and innovation are essential in a business, it makes sense that people and teams develop these skills in order to create a successful career. In fact, innovation is the lifeblood of many organizations, so much so, businesses such as Microsoft include innovation as one of their core values. Although it's beneficial to enhance individual creative thinking and problem solving, to be truly innovative, it takes a team to deliver. This is where team ideas are put into practice to create new ways of working and new products and services. The shift in focus has been from enhancing individual creativity to building on these skills to develop a culture of collaborative team innovation. With all of this change taking place, how does it affect you? Being able to adapt well, deal with change, and be creative are essential skills in today's workplace, as are the ability to take action, apply ideas, and create innovative products, services, and processes. The key is to start by working on your own creativity capability, practicing the arts of generating novel ideas, challenging the status quo, and making connections between different concepts that may not appear to be related initially. Once you're on the path to enhancing your own creativity by applying tools and strategies, the next step is to take those skills into a group environment where the emphasis is collectively working to create innovative outputs. The skills required here can be slightly different. You may find the individual creativity aspect takes concerted effort for you, but when it comes to testing and implementing ideas, that's where you come into your own. You may also find you enjoy collaboratively developing ideas, building on suggestions that others have put forward. On the flip side, the individual creativity part may be where you feel at home and you have to work at collaborating well with others. But this is an essential skill if you want to effectively put novel ideas into practice. Take some time to think about your creative abilities. How creative would you say you are? Is this a skill you could work on? Think about how you work with others when coming up with new ideas and planning how to implement these. Is this something you are comfortable with?