The role of HR in innovation, creator or destroyer

I can already hear HR leaders telling me that enough is enough. That after becoming responsible for employer marketing, then for market intelligence and for holding the social fabric together, all that remains is for HR to learn massage and pizza-making. Even the environment has joined the queue.

Economic pressure, rising environmental expectations, shifting behaviours and the changing place of work in our society all stack up at once. The HR role keeps growing more complex, and the list shows no sign of closing.

And there is more. After rediscovering the shop floor mindset, I believe HR should now become responsible for innovation.

The reason is that innovation has become a major challenge for organisations that constantly seek to differentiate themselves and lift their performance. The role of HR in innovation is routinely underestimated, when the HR director can be a decisive player in making innovation possible.

The assumption	What actually happens	The angle defended here
Innovation belongs elsewhereThe role of HR in innovation is usually treated as support work, with the real creativity assumed to sit in research, product or strategy. HR is invited once the idea already exists, to recruit for it and to train around it.	HR decides who gets inRecruitment criteria, mobility rules, performance measures and training budgets determine which profiles enter the organisation and which behaviours survive inside it. An HR function that never questions those rules quietly filters out the very people who would have changed something.	Creator or destroyer, never neutralBenjamin Chaminade’s position is that HR holds a switch rather than a supporting part. The same function that can build a culture of innovation can also extinguish it through rigid process, and the iconoclasts an organisation needs are exactly the ones its systems reject.

The role of HR in innovation, creator or destroyer

The HR director works first to establish a culture of innovation inside the organisation. That runs through the promotion of creativity, open-mindedness and risk-taking. It also means encouraging collaboration and the sharing of ideas across departments and hierarchical levels.

How HR destroys the innovation it says it wants

HR can put in place training programs, workshops and internal events that stimulate the exchange of ideas and mutual learning. The same function can also destroy innovation, through practices and behaviours that obstruct creativity and collaboration.

Here are the ways an HR function damages innovation without ever intending to:

1. Lack of strategic vision. An HR leader without a clear view of why innovation matters, and without active commitment to supporting it, slows initiatives and discourages the people who raise them.
2. Rigid HR processes. Processes that are too rigid in recruitment, training and skills management limit the diversity of profiles and capabilities, and block the emergence of new and original ideas.
3. Resistance to change. A conservative HR posture leads to stagnation in practices and working methods, which erodes the organisation’s capacity to innovate.
4. Favouritism and discrimination. Decisions that display favouritism or discrimination create mistrust and unhealthy competition between colleagues, which damages collaboration and the emergence of innovative ideas.
5. No recognition of innovative initiatives. When contributions to innovation go unrecognised and unvalued, people stop engaging in innovative projects and stop sharing their ideas.
6. Authoritarian management. A hierarchical, authoritarian style smothers the creativity and autonomy of team members, which damages innovation directly.
7. Lack of communication and transparency. Without clear communication about the objectives and stakes of innovation, misunderstanding and frustration spread, and innovation stalls.

Avoiding these traps requires an open, flexible and supportive posture, and full commitment to promoting and supporting innovation across the organisation.

Recruiting innovative profiles

Supporting innovation requires a team with diverse and complementary capabilities. HR therefore has to recruit varied profiles who bring new perspectives and new ideas into the organisation.

It also matters to value innovation and creativity capabilities during interviews, and to promote internal professional development opportunities so that those capabilities keep growing once people are inside.

Supporting internal mobility and the evolution of capabilities

Internal mobility and the evolution of capabilities are two key factors in supporting innovation. HR can make movement across the organisation easier, by opening bridges between departments and encouraging temporary secondments onto innovative projects.

Alongside that, investing in continuous learning and capability development lets people adapt to technological change and to new market conditions. The two levers work together, since mobility without learning simply moves the same skills around.

Encouraging knowledge sharing and collaborative work

Knowledge sharing and collaborative work are essential to the emergence of ideas and the delivery of innovative projects. HR therefore has to encourage exchange between colleagues and put in place the tools and spaces that make collaboration possible.

That can mean internal communication platforms, coworking spaces or co-creation workshops. HR also has to make sure that good practices and lessons learned circulate between teams, to accelerate collective learning and sharpen the innovation process.

To start or strengthen collaboration, remember that collaboration is anything but natural. It arrives as an indirect effect of the trust and wellbeing that exist in an organisation. For people to feel free to express their ideas and to innovate, a climate of trust and support has to be established first.

HR holds a key role in creating that climate, by promoting respect, listening and mutual support. It also has to make sure that errors and failures are treated as learning opportunities rather than as faults to be punished.

Innovation as a culture rather than an accident

For HR innovation to become a culture rather than a rare, inexplicable and unrepeatable accident, the deepest beliefs we all hold about running an organisation have to be put back into perspective. That is where the work starts.

Questioning the most firmly anchored management beliefs

The next step is understanding how to manage a team and how to make decisions. We now have to follow a different logic, even when it leads us to do things that feel counter-intuitive or strange.

To innovate, an organisation has to accept doing things that contradict its most firmly anchored management practices, whether those practices concern motivation, learning methods or recruitment systems.

Many managers still believe they can develop a new offer while applying the same methods as always. Worse, those methods often come from school or from a creativity course, and HR innovation sometimes rests on nothing more solid than that.

Identifying the iconoclasts and preparing their arrival

This is where the HR professional walks on stage. The job is to identify the iconoclasts, make their integration possible, and prepare current team members and managers for their arrival.

Each of those three tasks fails on its own. Identifying an iconoclast without preparing the team produces a short, painful appointment. Preparing the team without recruiting anyone produces a workshop and nothing else.

How the role of HR in innovation is redrawn by HR innovation itself

Three responsibilities follow one another, and skipping any one of them wastes the other two. Identification, integration and diffusion form a sequence rather than a menu.

First, make a culture of innovation possible

The first role of HR in innovation is to make the creation of a culture of innovation possible. That means identifying the iconoclasts who want neither to do things « as before » nor to do them « by the procedure ».

These are people who, despite their lack of respect for the past, are trying to improve what exists. Identifying them is fairly simple. The hard part is assessing their capacity to enter a pre-existing system with established rules, values and customs.

Second, support the newcomers and their managers

Recruiting these iconoclasts will fall short on its own. You will almost certainly have to fight to get them accepted by managers who want one thing only: someone like themselves, who makes no waves and delivers the best results as fast as possible.

That is the second role of HR. Support the new arrivals and their managers, make assimilation possible on one side and understanding possible on the other. The line is razor thin, and the risk runs both ways, since you can discourage the newcomer as easily as you can push their manager into disengagement.

Third, spread the culture and hold the resources steady

Finally, once you are talking about culture or mindset, the HR professional carries responsibility for spreading a culture that values innovation, while keeping resources stable and durable over time. Strategic workforce planning exists for exactly this.

I have rarely met HR leaders ready to prioritise innovation in management, recruitment, learning and retention. Most content themselves with following procedures, applying methodologies, reading books and running benchmarks.

Which HR innovation levers deserve your investment

Several HR levers are presented as innovation drivers, and they carry very different costs, timelines and risks. Weighing them against explicit criteria matters more than adopting them all at once.

The seven levers that reshape the role of HR in innovation

The HR trends tied to innovation are numerous and constantly evolving. Here are the major ones that shape the human resources landscape and fall directly under HR responsibility.

1. Hybrid and distributed work. These modes create new opportunities to stimulate innovation, by supporting collaboration across distance. Atlassian, founded in Sydney, reports in its distributed work research that 92 per cent of its people say the policy lets them do their best work, with staff spread across more than 10,000 locations rather than its dozen offices.
2. Artificial intelligence and automation. AI is increasingly used in recruitment, learning and performance review, which lifts process efficiency and frees time for higher-value work. Trust remains the constraint, since the National AI Centre reports that distrust of AI decision-making is the single biggest reason Australian businesses hold back.
3. Diversity and inclusion. Attracting and keeping people with varied paths supports creativity and team performance. The structural gap is documented in Australia, where the Workplace Gender Equality Agency reports that women hold 43 per cent of manager roles and that more than half the workforce sits in an industry dominated by one gender.
4. Continuous learning and professional development. Online learning, mentoring programs and partnerships with education providers all support capability growth. Google’s Grow with Google program is one widely copied example of an employer building learning pathways rather than buying courses.
5. Engagement. Inspiring work environments, transparent communication and a culture that values creativity all feed engagement, and engagement feeds innovation. Gallup measures that only 20 per cent of employees worldwide report being engaged, which sets the size of the opportunity.
6. Skills management and internal mobility. These become critical as the labour market shifts. Jobs and Skills Australia reports that 29 per cent of assessed occupations remain in national shortage, which makes internal movement cheaper and faster than external hiring in many cases.
7. Performance management oriented towards innovation. Objectives and reviews can account for a person’s contribution to innovation alongside individual performance. The best known example remains 3M, where people are encouraged to spend a share of their working time on projects of their own choosing.

How to choose between them against your own criteria

These levers differ on three things that decide whether they will work in your organisation: how long they take to show an effect, how much cultural change they require, and where they fail when the culture is not ready.

Lever	Time to visible effect	Cultural change required	Where it fails
Distributed work	Short	High	Managers who measure presence rather than outcomes
AI in HR processes	Short	Medium	Low trust and no governance of how decisions are made
Diversity and inclusion	Long	High	Selection criteria that keep rewarding resemblance
Continuous learning	Medium	Low	Training treated as a budget line rather than a pathway
Internal mobility	Medium	Medium	Managers who hoard their best people
Performance measures for innovation	Long	High	Reviews that still reward delivery only

Read the last column first. Every one of these levers fails for a managerial reason rather than a technical one, which tells you where to spend your first month of effort.

These HR trends influence how organisations recruit, manage and develop their people, and they contribute to creating dynamic and inventive working environments. Your move.

How I can help you strengthen the role of HR in innovation

Turning an HR function into an engine of innovation happens in its criteria and its rituals rather than in a values statement. That is where I work with HR teams and their executive committees.

Keynotes and masterclasses for HR teams

On stage, I show HR leaders the mechanics by which their own processes filter out the profiles they say they want. The objective is to move a room from defending its systems to auditing them, using cases from real engagements rather than models.

This format works well as the opening of an HR seminar, because it reframes innovation as something HR owns rather than something HR supports.

Workshops to rebuild your criteria

In workshops, we take your actual recruitment scorecards, your mobility rules and your performance criteria, and we test each one against the question of whether it rewards resemblance or difference.

Teams leave with rewritten criteria they can use in the next hiring round, along with the arguments to defend them in front of the managers who will resist. That resistance is predictable and it is manageable once you have prepared for it.

Conclusion

An HR function is never neutral towards innovation. It either builds the conditions in which new ideas survive contact with the organisation, or it filters those ideas out through criteria nobody has reread in years.

The work is concrete rather than inspirational: identify the iconoclasts, prepare the teams who will receive them, and hold the resources steady long enough for the culture to take. Do that, and the role of HR in innovation stops being a slogan on a conference slide and becomes the most powerful lever an organisation has.

Frequently asked questions about the role of HR in innovation