Communication is a strategic tool that enables the successful management of innovation processes within a company or work team. It is also a key element, essential to innovation itself, giving rise to it, expanding it, and consolidating it as a fundamental part of the culture of an efficient organization—an organization that changes, transforms, and flows with innovation as part of its DNA.

We share some reflections and a brief manifesto on the relationship between I+C, “innovation and communication”, or more properly C+I, “communication for innovation”. 

The ever-brilliant Albert Einstein said that "you can't solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created it." And the equally brilliant Leopoldo Marechal also said that "you escape the labyrinth from above." We must look to the sky and jump, even if we fear the void. In the end, the truth is that the jump doesn't lead us to emptiness: the jump "fills" the void and gives it meaning.

Communication is at the root of innovative ideas. How?

1. The new challenges come to the organization through the area of ​​communication, Sensitive agendas, crisis contingencies, social changes, and others. Challenges whose management increasingly requires expertise in so-called "soft skills," since the first step is to convince the organization of the need to take action in the face of the changing environment.
2. Today's organizations are more permeable to their environment and more open to change. Organizations are evolving, adaptive systems, and communication is the interface with that environment. What's needed isn't more communication, but better communication. Better communication leads to greater adaptive and transformative capacity, and constant adaptation to change demands agile management methodologies.
3. The communications department helps formulate the questions that are relevant to the organization.It generates powerful questions that encourage teams to investigate and learn. We must learn not only "how" to do things in new contexts, but fundamentally "why" and "for whom."
4. There is no innovation without research. Innovation is the way to solve new problems. Sometimes, the etymologies of words are truly revealing and enlightening. “Innovate” comes from the Latin verb “innovare,” which means “ire in novo,” “to go toward the new.” And its perfect complement, its counterpart, is “research,” derived from the Latin expression “ire in vestigium,” “to go toward the vestiges, toward the foundations.” Thus, innovation and research, or research for innovation, is precisely what all organizations today, large or small, need, and it is also what we need personally to be truly innovative.

Communication is at the heart of expanding innovation

5. Creativity is a skill. Innovation is a dimension of the organization. And creativity is a distributed skill, exercised in relation to a context. Likewise, all communication that aspires to be effective and relevant must be contextual. Communication does not exist in a vacuum; every communication process must be intentionally designed for its intended audience.
6. Communication helps to get teams excited about innovative ideas.To motivate them, not only with incentives or extrinsic reasons, but also with internal reasons that are what truly drive people.
7. To achieve this, change agents must create new model readers, moving away from the commonplace: also innovate in the way innovation projects are communicated. It would be pointless and ineffective to innovate in projects without also innovating in how they are communicated. Communication itself must also be innovative.
8. Scheduled conversation is the tool for sharing and growing ideas. Conversations produce ideas that are more than the sum of the ideas of each interlocutor: 1 + 1 = 3. But they also arise from unplanned dialogues, from which we can emerge saying "eureka".

Communication, finally, is at the heart of implementing innovation

9. Innovation takes shape in projects. And these projects require a storytelling. Un storytelling Organizational, of course, but very much embodied in the leaders. As Daniel Goleman, the great promoter of emotional intelligence, states: “great leaders are great storytellers.”
10. A project involves coordinating various roles, and for that, Communication is the fuel for projectsA fuel with very high octane rating, and wonderful power and energy.
11. Projects must take into account user perceptions: User Experience Design. Otherwise, systems, processes, or work methods are implemented that do not take into account how employees work and their need to interact with each other and provide feedbackThe so-called “employee experience” must be closely linked to the “user experience”, of course, also with respect to the internal “user” of innovation, “user” and “protagonist”

Projects should be improvable and well presented so that collaborators can adopt and adapt them to their needs. This is how innovation works. Like the book by the great Spanish poet Miguel Hernández, it is “the lightning that never ceases.” Never.
An innovative organization is constantly searching for a new language that better explains its purpose.
A new language, new metaphors, a new discourse, new stories, all inspired by the common goal of creating meaning, of create meaning.
The purposes, the shared visions, must be inspiring, moving us within the “change curve” and its five phases: denial, resistance, exploration, adaptation and commitment. There is no innovation without a commitment to the new, the surprising, even the dazzling. And the consequent management of change.

In short, Innovation is the true art of life. And communicating innovation is the art of that art. One without the other only generates inertial changes, without purpose or meaning. Without true effectiveness. Life itself is change, but experience gives us all plenty of evidence that these changes are not always necessarily for the better, they are not always pure gains in personal and organizational growth.

Change requires synergy. Complementarity. Innovative, positive-sum games—the only ones where everyone wins only if everyone else wins too. Innovation and communication are those kinds of games.