10 Ideas To Engage Employees on World Creativity & Innovation Day

World Creativity and Innovation Day is a global UN day, observed annually on 21 April. To help you mark it this year, Simon Rutter shares 10 ideas to engage your employees on this topic.

Creativity and innovation are essential for progress in any area of life. In business, they enable you to conceive and bring to market new products and services, attract and retain talented people, and boost your reputation and brand. 

World Creativity and Innovation Day is a global UN day, observed annually on 21 April. To help you mark it this year, we’ve compiled 10 ideas to engage your employees on this topic.

What is World Creativity and Innovation Day? 

The purpose of the day is to highlight the importance of creativity and innovation in problem solving, whether economic, political, or social. Because creativity is subjective, the day aims to foster creative multidisciplinary thinking at individual and group levels to generate new ways to tackle challenges we face. 

Why are creativity and innovation so important? 

Stronger financial performance 

To start with, they have the potential to generate significant value. The top 50 companies in the 2023 Most Innovative Companies report outperform the MSCI World Index on shareholder return by 3.3 percentage points per year. 

Small wonder, then, that 79% of companies ranked innovation among their top three priorities, up from 75% in 2022. This is a near-record high, and with 40% expecting to increase spending in this area this year, it demonstrates the growing appreciation that creativity drives, rather than distracts, from business results. 

Attract and retain the best people 

The fact is, the majority of candidates (69%) will switch jobs to work for a more innovative company. This doesn’t mean everyone wants to work for a tech giant – innovation can come in many different forms (for example, how you onboard) that need to be authentic to your business operations and culture. It’s also not exclusively a Gen Z preference – all ages are now looking for employers with a reputation for embracing and empowering creativity. 

Most candidates want to do great, boundary-pushing work at your organization, while building their skills and improving their employability. If you provide the environment where they can do that, you’ll attract and retain the best talent with the skills necessary to future-proof your business. 

Enhances brand and reputation 

Innovation accounts for 12.8% of corporate reputation among consumers globally. Your reputation – that emotional but intangible appeal that determines stakeholder support – is heavily influenced by whether your company is perceived as innovative. Reputation is impossible to measure in currency terms, but its value to your bottom line is unquestionable. 

Innovation also drives brand growth, which can be quantified. As KantarBrandZ shows, strong brands deliver better shareholder returns than the S&P 500. In challenging times such as we’re going through now, brands that continue to innovate grow seven times faster than competitors. Simply put, the biggest and strongest brands on the planet live and die by innovation.

Ideas to engage employees on World Creativity & Innovation Day

The value of innovation to organizations, then, cannot be overestimated. Here are 10 ideas to get your employees engaged and their creative juices flowing. 

1. Give your employees a learning credit for taking any type of educational training that day (can be on any topic). This will show the importance you place on continuous personal development. 

2. Share stories of failure and lessons learned. Creativity and innovation are an endless process that involve many failures. To be an innovative company, you need to be okay with failure, celebrate it, and learn from it. Having your leaders share examples of this will be hugely powerful and demonstrate that you understand what innovation really means.  

3. Involve your customers. Many of the most innovative organizations in the world co-create products and solutions with customers. Look at ways to get your people closer to customers – for example, can they speak to customers on the phone, or do field visits? 

4. Get outside. The benefits of the outdoors for opening up mental space for new ideas are well known. Get your employees out of the office and into the nearest park, woods, or riverside – wherever it is, as long as it’s not stuck at their desk. Fresh thinking and problem solving will flood back into your organization, I guarantee.  

5. Run a hackathon/makeathon. These intense bursts of mental and/or physical activity can focus the mind and encourage collaboration. Set your people a real business problem you need solving and you’ll be amazed what they can come up with, and even create, in a day. 

6. Change one thing. Challenge every employee to change one thing they are going to do at work that day. For example, how they are going to start a meeting? The message is that innovation is about small, incremental steps that add up – not big bang ideas.  

7. Have people swap jobs. Doing a different role, even for a day, can open your mind to different perspectives that will undoubtedly change how you think and act in your day job. Encourage people to swap jobs for a day and share their observations with their counterpart. 

8. Ringfence the day or a certain time for innovation. Clear the corporate calendar and set aside the day, or a part of it, for employees to be creative and innovative in any way they want. They then have to share what they’ve done – and learned – with their team by the end of the day. 

9. Communicate what creativity and innovation mean to your company. Through town halls, team meetings, stories on your channels etc, tell your people the role that creativity and innovation play in your organization (and have done throughout the years) so they can connect it to your strategy. 

10. Reward and recognize creativity and innovation. Showcase those people in your business who have demonstrated what creativity and innovation mean to you. This will show your people how much you value these skills, and their stories will inspire colleagues.  

The key takeaways

This is by no means an exhaustive list. However you decide to mark the day, the key points to remember are: 

• Define what creativity and innovation mean for your organization, and the role they play in your strategy 
• Be authentic in your activities 
• Have a plan to embed creativity and innovation into your culture and business operations  

Creativity and innovation are daily, not annual, practices that can differentiate your business and supercharge your performance. Whatever you do, let this World Creativity and Innovation Day be the springboard for your future company success.