If speed to market and quality are water, innovation is air. Your business cannot live for long without it. Even a slight shortage will reflect in your performance.

With that in mind, take steps to keep your team devising new ways to tackle problems, learning from each other and creating the best possible output. Innovation is one part culture and one part the culmination of efforts to stretch your team and create an environment in which innovation is possible.

Done well, you will break down barriers. You can foster teamwork and communication to encourage staff to reach their full potential.

Use these tips to build your team's innovation capacity.

• Allow for Innovate Ideas Many company cultures squelch innovation by discouraging ideas that go against current operating procedures. A sustained approach of this nature will quickly sap the innovation from an organization and do potential long-term damage to a team's output. To counter this, create a culture in which ideas can be accepted and implemented even if they challenge longstanding beliefits.

• Create a Culture of Patience Only by changing the automatic reactions to new ideas can you give them a chance. Often, an innovation approach or idea is dismissed before someone has a chance to explain its value. Although it may sound contrived, implement a standard that allows for ideas to be fully aired.

• Involve Senior Management Management may be required to change its ways for innovation to take place across your organization. Key to the success of innovation is the commitment on the part of management to do three things. One, encourage disagreement. Company leaders need to ask for input and genuinely welcome ideas that run counter to current approaches. Two, management needs to redefine its concept of productivity. Leaders who look at the success solely as moving projects forward quickly according to established standards will not foster innovation. Three, focus on morale. People who are rewarded for raising problems and who have input into their projects are productive.
  

• Feed the Innovation Beast Keep innovation flowing in your organization by continually training your team. Provide staff members with the opportunity to choose their own educational directions, within a broadly defined universe of training possibilities. Complement your team's growth with a broad spectrum of ideas by tapping external resources on a regular basis.

• Proactively Design an Innovation Culture Add innovation to your company's guiding principles. Undertaking the tangible steps of rewriting company tenets, vision and other goals to reflect a commitment to innovation will send an important message to your team members that they work for a company that plans to take a path less traveled. Encourage employees to commit to innovation by encouraging them to think of themselves as the customer.