How can your business build and sustain an innovation process that continues to produce inspired, relevant, workable ideas that lead to profits? Click to read on.
Innovation drives businesses to become more, to be greater, and to succeed where others fail. But innovation is difficult to sustain. A new business has more ideas than their resources would ever allow them to develop, but over time, the new ideas give way to normal, everyday, hum drum business as usual, and innovation is scarce or non-existent. How can your business build and sustain an innovation process that continues to produce inspired, relevant, workable ideas that lead to profits?
1. Invest in the Right Innovation Tools
The right software can keep the innovation process moving along.
Good innovation tools empower communications and collaboration
and help workers take nebulous ideas and refine
those ideas until they are ready to hit the marketplace.
All of your other teams -- the help desk, sales team, production workers, accountants, legal, and more -- have software to do their jobs. Does your innovation team have software that supports, encourages, and develops their innovation processes? If you want any team to do a great job, you have to empower them with the right tools. Get innovation software to help your team add and evaluate their ideas and work through the process of bringing those ideas to fruition. When shopping for innovation software, look for features that make it easy for your team to collaborate, share and refine their ideas, and stay on top of the progress they are making.
2. Balance Large Ideas With Smaller Ones
Too many innovation teams believe that only the big, earthshaking ideas are worthwhile. This means that they pass by all of the smaller ideas, waiting for the big one to come along. In reality, the benefits of numerous small ideas can actually impact the company as much or more than a single, grand innovation. Plus, producing small ideas that can be implemented quickly helps encourage the team to keep working on innovation in general. A lack of production deflates the innovation team's confidence and frustrates the top executives, who fail to see any progress for their investments. Producing small, manageable ideas on a regular basis keeps your team fresh, motivated, and rewarded and helps to refine their innovation process so that the big ideas that do come along can be pushed through and executed quickly and efficiently.
3. Get More People Involved in the Innovation Process
It is a mistake to limit innovation to a small group of people. The best innovation comes when you have lots of different people with varied talents and diverse skill sets. Make sure your innovators come from different disciplines and have different strengths and weaknesses. For example, creatives are essential for ideation, but don't overlook the value of analytical and methodical types. Your creative types will toss out lots of ideas, while the more careful, analytical workers will hone and refine the ideas. In the end, you will end up with more ideas, better ideas, and better execution of the ideas.
4. Focus on Results, Not Just Activities
Bragging about how many of your workers participate in an innovation activity or other activity-related metrics takes your eye off the real prize, which is the actual results you're producing. It doesn't really matter how many innovation activities you have. What does matter is that those activities are producing real, measurable results, no matter how small or grand those results may be. Be sure your metrics focus on results. Also, be sure that your innovation team is able to embrace and celebrate their accomplishments when their ideas are brought to market.
5. Keep Innovators Engaged With New Activities
Although the metrics shouldn't focus on activities versus results, you do need to keep changing up your innovation activities in order to keep producing good results. For example, a mid-morning brainstorming session might be fresh at the beginning and produce lots of great ideas and idea development. But a year from now, it isn't fresh and new, and nothing worthwhile is coming out of those sessions. Switch it up -- continually change up the innovation activities you use so that the team continues to produce fresh and exciting ideas. Bring new people in. Offer new incentives for innovation. New innovation activities are the ideal way to refresh the team's perspective and generate new ideas.
6. Get (and Keep) Executive Sponsors
Executive sponsorship is important for a number of reasons. First, it helps keep the interests of the innovation team focused on its contribution to the business as a whole. Additionally, an executive sponsor can help the team get needed resources when no one else at the top is willing to open their pocketbook. Executive sponsors can also help break down barriers across departments. Sometimes it's easy for office politics or petty quarrels between departments or managers to stand in the way of innovation. Executive sponsors also help keep the innovation team motivated when things aren't going as planned and the team gets down and discouraged.
7. Be Sure That Innovation is Relative to Business Value
Make sure that your innovation team stays connected to the business
units so that the ideas they produce are relevant and
bring value to the business side. Otherwise, innovators
can get off track and spend time, money, and other valuable resources
on 'innovations' that simply don't fit the business model or
help the organization reach their goals or fulfill their mission.
Another way that innovation teams can wander astray is when they lose focus on how their ideas and idea execution delivers actual business value. It is critical that the innovation team stay connected to the business units so that their ideas come from needs, goals, and problems from the business side, and that the concepts they develop meet those needs, move the business forward toward meeting those goals, and solve the business problems for a more successful future. Always make sure that the innovation team stays closely aligned with the business and its mission, goal, and purpose.
Are you ready to learn more about what it takes to be successful at innovation? You can download the whitepaper: The Execution of Innovation: What You Need to Know now for free.
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