It is essential for a business to be engaged in innovation. However, discovering and engaging with innovation is something many companies continue to struggle with, for all their best intentions. What is needed is a greater understanding of what it is, and for leaders to be engaged in proper innovation management.
Innovation management
It’s the combination of methods and tools that allow professionals to properly understand a company’s targets, goals, and objectives. To have a true innovative breakthrough, there should be a strong focus, if not the entire focus, on research and development.
During this process, the actions and practices that allow for ideas to become reality are discovered, and this increases the overall value of the business.
Tips for innovation management
1. Don’t wait with taking action. Your strategy should include collecting data and analyzing it. This way, needs are discovered immediately, allowing for solutions to be developed.
2. Ensure all employees can take part in innovation, regardless of their position.
3. Emphasize that there is no such thing as a bad idea.
4. Increase team diversity. This will allow for different points of views and outlooks to blend. Mix different demographics, but also different positions and teams.
5. Understand that conflict can be good, and that it is often inevitable as well. However, don’t allow conflict to escalate and become a problem.
6. People in the innovation team should be selected for what they know, and for who they know. This increases connections, allows you to look at competition, and makes it more likely to find the right professionals to actually action on an innovative idea.
7. A leader should be chosen and they should be given all the necessary tools for achieving success.
8. Make sure the innovation team also focuses on finding gaps in marketing, and to come up with ways to market these gaps.
9. Team members should be excellent communicators, so that they can explain not just their idea, but also their strategy for implementation. They should be inspiring to others and real story tellers.
10. Write an action plan that can be measured properly.
11. Understand that innovation is new, and that it is this very new, fresh outlook that allows people to come up with out of the box ideas.
12. Make sure everybody knows they will be listened to, and that they should give their all when it comes to developing innovation.
13. Partner up with media professionals who know how to get messages across to your audience and to the team within the company itself.
13. All innovation should include social media and the internet. You may also want to focus on mobile usage.
When you combine the above tips, have a focus on research and development, and give everybody in your organization an equal voice, innovation will start to come naturally.
Remember that there are no wrong answers in innovation, just wrong ways of managing it. And remember that there may be no such thing as a bad idea, that still doesn’t mean every idea has to be implement – rather, it has to be considered.
1 comment
Good points.
I’d add that most innovation comes from generalists, because inventions are usually new ways of putting together things from DIFFERENT areas.
So, while you are likely to need specialists in some areas of your business, be aware that it’s usually generalists who will create and invent, because of the way the process works, so make sure you work with those too :)
Chris
Comments are closed.