The best workplaces for innovators are characterized by a company culture that empowers employees and enables change in order to generate the cultivation of new ideas, encourage experimentation, improve processes, develop new products, and embrace the innovation mindset.

Opportunities abound when employees face change and in order to become a valuable asset for the organization, it’s important to embrace change in the workplace.

Companies that foster inventiveness and encourage creativity to attract and drive loyalty among employees, who on the other hand welcome and stay in work environments where innovation is valued.

A study conducted by Fast Company in 2019 singled out businesses that assume these “empowering” characteristics and at the same time accept failure as inevitable on the journey to success.

Such companies are admired for giving employees across the corporate hierarchy from entry-level hires to senior management positions, the opportunity to make a positive impact in the workplace. Below are picked from Fast Company’s list of these best workplaces for innovators.

AMD

This leading semiconductor company uses groups of engineers to simultaneously work on successive generations of core chip designs to ensure consistent communication, preservation of knowledge, and enforcement of best practices.

AMAZON

Amazon cultivates ideas from more than 600,000 employees through a process called “working backward”, which supports employees with big ideas to create a plan comprising of a customer-impact statement, a mock press release, key questions, and perspectives from different business areas.

ATTIVO NETWORKS

Attivo, a cybersecurity firm that helps businesses detect and respond to attacks via state-of-the-art technology, assigns a “champion” to mentor each new hire, which eventually led to a 93% annual employee retention rate, thus reallocating revenues into priority research and development projects.

BLUE PRISM

The robotic-process automation company opened a new artificial intelligence lab in its London facility, in addition to making its proprietary software and training materials available to universities such as Texas A&M, Aditya Engineering College and the University of Manchester.

ACTIVISION BLIZZARD

The video-game company which made World of Warcraft, Candy Crush, Call of Duty, and Overwatch League encourages employees to participate in a semiannual company tournament called the 5×5 Innovation Challenge, wherein teams are given time and budget to create a pitch which shall address a specific company challenge.

3M

Famous for Post-it Notes and Scotch tape, 3M earns around 3,000 patents every year and encourages its 91,000 employees to allocate 15% of their work hours to innovative ventures.

B-REEL

The Swedish creative agency regularly assigns team members from its various global offices to spend time in its Barcelona R&D lab to work on a custom brief designed around a significant challenge, such as creating a new application for Google’s AR Core product.

CHOBANI

The yogurt company created a 359-person in-house department that brought 90% of its agency work, which includes advertising, PR, design, consumer research, and retail execution in its own backyard, thus increasing collaboration, and reducing inefficiencies as well as budget. Through the department, Chobani developed and launched its Less Sugar Greek Yogurt product in less than six months.

ANSYS

With full support from management via a dedicated workspace, servers, and relief from their normal duties, Ansys developers utilized fast graphics processing units for the company’s core software product and enabled the launch of the first engineering software that provides real-time physics simulation and geometry editing.