How to involve employees in the development of your company

Within DVJ we distinguish between two types of innovation. Continuous innovation and radical innovation. Both are based upon different principles and ways of working, but both forms of innovation revolve around the idea that everyone within the company contributes to the innovation process. For continuous innovation, I like to use the analogy of weightlifting which is my personal hobby. To get better at weightlifting, you need to practice intensively and consistently and have a firm mindset about how you reach your goals. Every day I focus on a small detail that will make the movement slightly better and enables me to lift one kilo more than the day before. I remind myself of two things along the way: 1) It is impossible to realise big steps in one day and 2) In order to get stronger, you need to accept that failing is even more important than success.

The same applies to innovation. We are creating an organisation where everyone in the company focuses on one small detail daily (a question in the questionnaire, a new visualization, a step to make something more efficient, etc.) and finds a way to do that slightly better than yesterday while accepting that failure is part of the process. If everyone does this, the entire company will improve significantly over time. Therefore, at DVJ, we like to talk about improving instead of innovation.

The second type of innovation is more radical and focuses on which new solutions we want to have in the company. Every year, we hold internal Innovation Awards in which everyone in the company participates. We divide all DVJers into small teams and every team comes up with new ideas about a certain topic. Sometimes clients and professors from different universities join us on this journey. The awards usually begin by describing the issue and the challenge, while sharing everything we already know about the topic and asking each team to come up with the best new solutions Because the groups are made up of different teams, departments, and levels, fantastic new ideas emerge. It is always amazing to see 100 smart people rethinking what we already do and making suggestions for improvement. The award is always a combination of a personal price and the honour that the winning idea will be created.

This year’s Innovation Award was part of the DVJ summer party in which we wanted to talk about our role in society and how we could create more societal impact as a company. The main question was: What would make us even more proud to work for DVJ? In order to come up with new ideas we started with an overview of all the activities that we have done over the past years. The result of this process was amazing. There are many ways that we as a company can create impact. And more importantly, we all want to create impact and use our knowledge to support initiatives that make a difference. By looking at what we can do in the short term, middle term and long term we were able to identify a list of activities that make us proud. Helping initiatives with solid and sound research to be even more effective. Via this newsletter, we will definitely keep you updated on all the things that we will do!