Despite having strategies, methodologies, and even innovation teams in place, many organizations find that their innovation efforts fail to gain real traction.

Employees remain disengaged, initiatives feel isolated, and innovation is seen as an abstract concept rather than a core business driver.

Culture plays a critical role in making innovation stick. Without a strong cultural foundation, even the most well-planned innovation strategies may lose momentum or be forgotten when employees return to day-to-day operations. The solution is to embed innovation into the very fabric of the organization’s DNA. So, how can this be achieved?

In a recent Innov8rs Learning Lab Session, Hiroshi Maeda, Global Innovation Manager at SHV Energy, shared how he and his team successfully integrated innovation into the business’s core culture. He offers valuable insights into transforming innovation culture from a concept to a lived reality across the organization.

Hiroshi Maeda

Global Innovation Manager at SHV Energy

Four Pillars of Culture

SHV Energy, an off-grid energy company operating across 25 countries with over 12,000 employees, embarked on its innovation journey in 2018. Like many legacy organizations, it faced significant roadblocks to make innovation relevant.

While initial efforts focused on forming the team and the methodology, Hiroshi realized by 2023 that culture and capability building had been deprioritized. Recognizing Peter Drucker’s famous axiom that “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” Hiroshi sought to rekindle SHV Energy’s innovation movement, acknowledging that he needed to find a way to incorporate innovation into everyday business practices and decision-making processes.

Building a strong innovation culture requires strategic intent and structure.

“Without a structured approach, innovation can easily become an afterthought rather than a driving force in an organization,” says Hiroshi.

He turned to an anthropological perspective when searching for a proven cultural framework to apply at SHV Energy.

The Four Pillars framework, initially studied by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss to understand how cultures sustain themselves over time, was later adapted by Tachibana for corporate environments. This model emphasizes four key cultural elements: Rituals, Stories, Artifacts, and Values. These pillars provide a blueprint for making innovation an integral part of an organization’s identity.

Rituals: Establishing Innovation as a Habit

“If you want to create lasting change, you have to make innovation a habit, not an event,” says Hiroshi. Rituals are repetitive actions that reinforce behaviors and values within a company. SHV Energy implemented several key rituals to instill innovation.

Rituals such as SHV’s Annual Innovation Community Meetings encourage collaboration among innovation leads across countries, providing a space to share learnings in a psychologically safe environment.

“One of our most impactful moments was when we dedicated part of these meetings to openly discussing failures—this helped normalize risk-taking and build trust,” Hiroshi notes.

Other rituals at SHV Energy include the Innovation Awards, which recognize and celebrate achievements in innovation. These ceremonies are a tangible reminder of the company’s commitment to progress. Weekly stand-ups also ensure regular habits that build momentum, while hackathons create excitement and engagement around solving business challenges with innovative thinking.

Stories: Amplifying Success and Learning from Failure

“Stories have the power to connect people to a vision and make innovation real,” Hiroshi explains. Stories shape organizational identity and create a shared sense of purpose. Hiroshi leveraged storytelling to solidify SHV Energy’s innovation culture. “We found that our short innovation vlogs were an effective way to capture real journeys—highlighting the problem, the innovation, and the results in a relatable format,” he shares.

One of SHV Energy’s most ambitious storytelling efforts is the Future-Oriented Innovation Book, which documents potential breakthroughs and inspires leaders to shape the company’s trajectory actively.

“Instead of just talking about past successes, we wrote a book filled with stories of what the company’s future could look like. It gave leaders something tangible to aspire to and discuss,” says Hiroshi.

Creating structured forums to discuss failures has helped reinforce a learning mindset.

Artifacts: Making Innovation Tangible

Artifacts serve as physical manifestations of an organization’s culture. “When people can see and touch innovation, it becomes part of their daily experience,” says Hiroshi. SHV Energy creatively used artifacts to bring innovation to life. “We 3D-printed our entire value chain and placed it in our office. This allowed everyone to physically see where innovation could transform our operations,” Hiroshi recalls.

The 3D-printed model, displayed prominently in the center of the office, visually represents the current operations. Employees can interact with the model using augmented reality to overlay projected improvements and the company’s future vision onto the existing framework.

Another crucial artifact Hiroshi’s team created is the Innovation Playbook, a structured guide consolidating methodologies, best practices, and tools for systematically executing innovation projects across the company. “The playbook was a game-changer. We needed something that could unify innovation efforts across all our business units and ensure that we spoke the same language,” Hiroshi explains.

To make it engaging, they developed the Innovation Playbook Poster, an interactive poster each team can hang up in their office to gamify innovation engagement. “We designed it with scratch-off achievements so teams could track progress and celebrate milestones. It made the playbook feel like a living, evolving part of our innovation culture,” says Hiroshi. The Innovation Awards Trophy further reinforces this culture, serving as a lasting reminder of the company’s commitment to innovation and rewarding continued efforts from employees toward impactful change.

Values: Aligning Innovation with Business Goals

Values define the core beliefs that guide decision-making and behaviors. “Innovation needs to be rooted in strong values. Otherwise, it risks becoming directionless,” Hiroshi asserts. “One of our strongest values is ensuring that innovation is not a side job but a core function with dedicated people in each business unit,” Hiroshi emphasizes. Each country within the company has a dedicated innovation lead or sponsor. These local innovation leaders drive projects tailored to their market’s unique needs while being supported by a centralized innovation team.

Conducting the Four Pillars Assessment Exercise

To help corporate innovators assess and strengthen their innovation culture, Hiroshi recommends a practical exercise using the Four Pillars Venn Diagram and post-its. Here’s how you can perform this assessment within your organization:

  1. Draw a Venn Diagram: Create a large Venn diagram with four overlapping circles labeled Rituals, Stories, Artifacts, and Values.
  2. Gather Your Team: Bring together key stakeholders from different departments involved in innovation efforts.
  3. Use Post-Its to Map Existing Culture Elements: Ask participants to write down current initiatives, behaviors, or practices that fit into each category and place them on the diagram accordingly.
  4. Identify Overlapping Areas: The more post-its that fall into overlapping sections, the stronger your innovation culture is. Overlaps indicate alignment between rituals, values, and tangible cultural artifacts.
  5. Spot Gaps and Opportunities: Cultural reinforcement is needed in circles with few post-its or where areas do not intersect much with others.
  6. Develop an Action Plan: Use insights from the exercise to introduce new initiatives that increase integration between the pillars. For example, you could reinforce values through stories or make innovation rituals more visible with artifacts.

“This exercise really opened our eyes to what we were doing well and where we needed to improve. It helped us move from isolated efforts to a more cohesive and impactful innovation culture,” says Hiroshi.

Scaling the Culture: Centralized vs. Decentralized Innovation

Many innovators debate whether to centralize or decentralize innovation efforts. At SHV Energy, this decision was not taken lightly. Hiroshi and his team recognized that while a centralized approach provides consistency, a decentralized model fosters adaptability in different markets. As a result, they implemented a hybrid approach that balances both strategies.

Each country’s dedicated innovation lead ensures innovation is a key business function. The global team offers capability-building, providing methodologies, tools, and governance structures to align efforts across all regions.

“We see ourselves as enablers rather than controllers,” Hiroshi notes.

A key component of this model is a digital idea management platform, which enables employees at all levels to submit ideas. “We needed a way to capture innovation from the frontline workers, not just from leadership,” Hiroshi shares. This tool ensures a steady flow of ideas across the company and facilitates structured evaluation processes, allowing promising initiatives to scale efficiently.

This hybrid model has allowed SHV Energy to maintain a strong, unified innovation strategy while ensuring that business units have the flexibility to execute locally relevant initiatives. “It’s about creating a structure where innovation can thrive naturally, without being forced,” Hiroshi concludes.

Building an Innovation Culture That Lasts

Establishing a strong innovation culture requires an integrated, organization-wide effort. Rituals help make innovation a consistent practice, stories create alignment and inspiration, artifacts serve as tangible reminders, and values ensure that innovation remains a priority rather than an afterthought.

“Innovation is not something you do on the side—it has to be woven into the fabric of how a company operates,” says Hiroshi. By leveraging these cultural pillars, organizations can move beyond strategy into execution, creating a sustainable, self-reinforcing culture of innovation that drives meaningful business impact.