Innovation is increasingly considered a key to growing profits, according to a new global survey of Millennials.

According to the Deloitte survey, 78 per cent of those surveyed believe innovation is essential for business growth. But despite the results, only 26 per cent of Millennials surveyed feel that business leaders are doing enough to encourage innovative pracrices.

“Sharing ideas freely in an organisation is critical for innovation to flourish and thrive,” said Deloitte Australia’s Chief Strategy Officer Gerhard Vorster. “While our current business leaders can debate how and where to innovate, it’s clear how much importance our future leaders place on innovation -not just as a driver of productivity and business growth, but as a catalyst for solving society’s most pressing problems.

“Millennials pinpoint creativity (62%) as the characteristic that will mark out future innovators, followed by academic ability, technical skills and most tellingly – the ability to challenge,” he said.

Conditions the global Millennials believe are required to foster innovation also differed markedly from the reality and include:

  • leadership encouraging idea sharing regardless of seniority (42%) with only 26% saying their current organisation operates in this way
  • a clear vision for the future (41%)
  • encouraging and rewarding idea generation and creativity (39%)with only 20% saying their current organisation operates in this way
  • commitment to successfully advancing innovative ideas (39%) with only 25% saying their current organization operates this way.

 

The survey results can be found here