The CEO of Exago, Diana Neves de Carvalho, was invited to an internal session about “how to encourage a culture of innovation in companies” for the employees of CTT, the market leader in postal services in Portugal.

In this special presentation, Diana spoke about how all leading companies today have an ‘Innovation Agenda’. She shared the findings that, for 84% of executives, innovation is extremely or very important for business growth strategy, yet over 90% are not satisfied with their innovation results.

The key message here is that business innovation is no longer a ‘nice asset’; it is paramount to the success of any company today. According to another report, CEOs believe that culture is the most important strategy to improve companies’ innovation performance. Therefore, innovation culture is the pillar of corporate performance.

For the Exago CEO, the lesson to remember is that companies grow more when everyone works together.

Diana noted that organisations that systematically search for collaboration opportunities gain twice as much profit and higher rates of product success. Specifically, she shared the 11 ingredients to promote a Collaborative Innovation Culture within an organisation, which include:

• A clear vision of the shared goals;
• Spaces, tools and moments dedicated to innovation;
• Continuously bringing in relevant challenges;
• Different and inclusive types of collaboration;
• Training focused on collaboration skills; among others.

At the end, Diana left this thought with the CTT team: Do you have what it takes to innovate collaboratively?

Bolstering innovation at CTT

Also taking part in the session was the firm Leadership Consulting. Assistant Manager António Ferrão spoke about the power of an innovation culture, the role of innovation champions and the need for betapreneurs to stimulate ideas and promote a trial-and-error approach to innovation.

‘How to develop an innovation culture?’ was the key question then asked by Ricardo Samora Tavares of CTT. In this presentation, he outlined the importance of corporate innovation, the key factors of an innovation culture and how to promote creativity within the workplace.

“The more we see the creativity all around us, the more we are able to appreciate the creativity inside ourselves,” said Ricardo. “The ABCD model is at the core of our approach: Always Be Connecting the Dots, by associating, questioning, observing, exploring and experimenting.”

The Exago software has been helping CTT connect the dots since early 2016, allowing it to successfully sow the seeds of its innovation programme. Almost half of the organisation’s visitors have already participated in its Inov+ platform, with over 500 participants, 4,000 comments shared and close to 1.5 ideas per active user.

How CTT sows the seeds of an innovation culture

Thanks to its commitment to innovation and sustainable growth, CTT has twice been recognised as the Innovation Farmer in the Exago Innovation Guru Awards. In 2017, the company received the award for its resilience to innovate, the strong support from leaders and its solid incentives package, which encourages a global culture of innovation.

It picked up the award yet again in 2018, with a strengthened innovation approach and the introduction of the Innovation Tank, which tackles the bottleneck of the generally smooth-running innovation funnel. It has already increased efficiency in the implementation phase by 400%.

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