Every year thousands of women attend Deutsche Bank’s annual Women on Wall Street Conference. Last Monday, Deutsche Bank hosted their 16^th annual conference, which I along with some of my colleagues had the pleasure of attending. This year’s theme was “Innovation: Ideas to Action”. Seems fairly timely considering the state of the economy and the need to create structure on Wall Street.

What stood out to me most at the conference was something one of the opening speakers, Steven Berlin Johnson, best-selling author, social critic and technologist, talked about regarding innovation. According to Steven, some companies allow their employee’s to dedicate 20% of their working time to thinking about innovation. More importantly, innovation is a collaborative effort and happens in groups. He emphasized the importance of weekly team meetings within an organization, as this is where creative thinking begins. It got me thinking about my own work day and how much time we spend as a team or in groups, actively brainstorming to think about the next best thing for our organization or our clients. I realized this is ingrained in our working practice everyday through daily team meetings, weekly client calls and the fact that we sit in an open plan office! The key here is communication – which undoubtedly is often the key to everything. From my time spent working in corporate America thus far, people often gravitate towards the need to work independently and associate success with coming up with an idea alone. Even Steve Jobs a co-founder of Apple, is not solely responsible for the success of the company.

So my question to you is: how are your organizations communicating internally and promoting innovation?