Workplace innovation can mean many things such as a change in business structure, HR management, or relationships. It improves motivation and working conditions for employees, which leads to increase labor productivity, innovation capability, market resilience, and overall business competitiveness. All enterprises can benefit from workplace innovation.

Companies face new challenges in a globalization context. Fast technological advances, demographic change and changing consumer demands, are some of them. Reinvent products, services and processes continuously is essential for survival and success. Senior-level teams need to take advantage of the creativity, ideas and commitment of the entire workforce. Leaders need to empower others to take the initiative, train them and support them towards successful results. They must become the champions of employee empowerment, participation and voice.

Over the last years, startups have been pivotal in changing the “office (or workplace) culture”. Working in startups is often quite intense and the schedule changes all the time. This means that offices had to become much more comfortable and friendly for those working on it, and organisation models more flexible.

Following the example of this startup trend to promote competitiveness and innovation, emerges the idea for the Start at Best project. Start at Best is a H2020 funded project with focus on Workplace Innovation. Its objective is to attract more SMEs to jump aboard the workplace revolution, highlighting 4 main objectives:

• Raise the awareness of the relevance of workplace innovation for business competitiveness among SMEs and Startups.
• Develop a repository of startup inspired case studies of workplace innovation to help SMEs develop their ideas and concepts.
• Promote, fund and support small scale projects for the development of workplace innovation in SMEs.
• Disseminate results at EU scale and promote the replication of successful initiatives.