Innovation is no longer something that you might want to think about, it is imperative to the success of your business. Everybody wants to be a hugely successful company and see their share prices rise. If you attend a business conference, at least part of the conference will be dedicated to innovation, with the clear message that it is an absolute must. These conferences are inspiring, but that inspiration often quickly turns to fear when you realise you don’t really know how to be innovate. This is because these conferences don’t give you the principles for action that you need.
This is why you need to know how to get help with managing innovation.
Get Help with Managing Innovation by Understanding what Innovation Is
Too many businesses think that innovation and strategy is one and the same thing. It is certainly true that strategy allows you to make choices in a way that is coherent and logical, but it is certainly not innovative. Innovation is about taking risks by thinking outside of the box and coming up with never tried solutions. Innovation is discovery, which means you don’t know what will happen until it happens.
Basically, when you get help with managing innovation, you will learn that it is not about creating a clear path to achieve your goals. Rather, it is about knowing that you have a goal and applying new solutions to achieving that. The framework for this needs to be compatible with the strategy, but it is a separate entity.
The Pillars of Innovation.
Innovation is truly complex. Every organisation is facing a variety of problems at the same time, and this means that the approaches they could take to resolving those are almost endless. Innovation, therefore, describes something that is absolutely huge. However, it is underpinned by three clear pillars, being:
1. You need to know the history of your organisation and the capabilities that are there. This is what will tell you what you will be able to do in an innovative manner. Every enterprise has the ability to improve, but none are able to completely change who they are.
2. Managers have to be able to allocate resources the right way. Innovation must be aligned with the overall strategic objectives. It is accepted that the best model for this is the 70/20/10 model, which allows to improve the existing, to search out commonalities and to explore the new.
3. Finally, no firm will ever be able to achieve success unless it has strong leadership and management to drive that change.
When you get help with managing innovation in your own business, these are the three pillars that must be worked on first. You need to think about what your capabilities are and what your goals are. Innovation is also about honesty and identifying whether or not you are ready to achieve your goals from your current position. Sometimes, you may need to identify different goals for the short term.
