There are many ingredients to innovation, and some of the most important are those that define the workplace — culture, mission, leadership and identity.

However, if today's employers view their workforces as static or homogenous resources to be dialed up when opportunity knocks and dialed down when the economic outlook presents unforeseen challenges, they're missing out on the potential of innovation and really failing to recognize all the segments of their employee population.

That's how training professional Jeanne Meister posited the challenge of innovation at the 2011 World Innovation Forum, where ExecuNet exclusively reported for attendees, and how companies might harness its potential if they rethink and recreate the workplace and tap into the interests of employees who, like customers, bring widely divergent work and communication habits to the market every day.

Meister, co-author of The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow's Employees Today and founding partner of the Future Workplace consultancy, outlined three primary forces that are already shaping the 2020 workplace today:

DEMOGRAPHICS
By 2020, Meister projected, there will be five distinct generations of Americans working side by side in the workplace, and that so-called Millennials will represent almost 50 percent of the workforce. "We think age diversity is the newest type of diversity...since individuals across generations have different communication and learning styles," she said. One key consideration for professionals of all ages is that, "If you want to be engaged and employable in the workplace, we have to all adopt a millennial mindset." That means integrating many of the web-based communications behaviors of today's younger workers into your routine, in part because it will become the norm in the workplace of the future.

SOCIAL WEB
Meister believes the emerging social web that connects people and ideas and which promises so much in innovation terms can actually have a big impact on creating and unearthing internal networks inside a company. The question is whether companies can seize on these opportunities to create the right internal dynamics that will allow the social web and innovation to cross-pollinate. To pursue the potential of internal corporate networks, companies have to recognize that there are both benefits and barriers at play:



By 2020, Meister added, "Every organization will have social media literacy training. It will be as common as diversity training and sexual harassment training."

GLOBALIZATION
The number of companies on the Fortune 500 list from emerging countries continues to increase, said Meister, and the business world will have a decidedly different epicenter than it does today. The implications for global workforce managers are huge, and they are tied directly to innovation capacity.

Join Jeanne on October 28th for an exclusive ExecuNet program on preparing for the 2020 workplace.

Robyn Greenspan
Robyn Greenspan is the Editor-in-Chief at ExecuNet, where she is responsible for setting and driving the editorial content engagement strategy across the private business network's publications and expert-led programming. She is also a Huffington Post blogger. You can follow her on Twitter @RobynGreenspan

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