What are the Best/Next Practices to Keep Innovation Alive in a Company?

Innovation is about moving forward. In any business, if you are not moving forward, you are moving backward.

Innovation is to transform novel ideas to achieve its business value. It is very important to recognize that innovation is an essential factor for a company’s long-term success. However, becoming a truly innovative company is difficult, due to the risks involved and management skills needed. Some might complain innovation has distracted them from their strategic focus, the fact is that innovation is an important element of your business strategy, so the problem is how you can keep innovation alive in your organization?

Groom innovation leaders boldly: Innovation is all around - the main problem is from the top accepting these ideas and respecting people's innovation. How would you assess profitability if you do not make a wholesome effort to innovate? There are nervous leaders in some organizations who refuse to innovate, use the same line of "profitable innovation" as an excuse. Eventually abandoning the effort to follow convention. To keep innovation alive in organizations, it is necessary first, assure your think tank that you are willing to make an investment with calculated risk.

Develop employees entrepreneurially. Let them do things and problems solving in their own way to meet good results. Though the guide is needed at that crucial time, you will see the innovations in your company’s pipeline. Management should direct workflow, support the health of the team, create an environment where people want to work, encourage brainstorming. If management is successful, innovation will follow. Stop and re-model the company around the passions of the people within it; find the new stars and let them drive. Business innovation is bravery - it may take you to a whole other place.

Mind innovation gaps substantially: The gap between the discovery, driving, and delivery driven management is critical and often leads to conflicts, deluding the transfer. When innovative skills and capabilities an organization always needs depends on the circumstances the business is in. Many companies form and grow on the basis of "idea creation," but then get bogged down when trying to "commercialize" those ideas--which requires a different skillset, focus, and even a needed passion. And, if a company's focus swings too far to the commercialization side of the equation, then innovation suffers and vice-versa. Companies form around great technology, product or service concept, but when that initial innovation reaches end-of-life, there may not be an aptitude or capability present to continue generating a needed innovation cycle. If you could create a culture that nurtures creativity and innovation, you might be on to something, people will dare to be innovative as long as they know they won't get penalized for a bad idea and may get rewarded for a good one. Priority, process and resource framework can be a tool to manage innovation more effectively. If a company would like to stay ahead, it needs to preserve a commitment to the discovery-driven (Disruptive Innovation) path to ensure that they are pursuing blue ocean, do not end up in the red-ocean and gets too paralyzed (self-sustained) in its perfection of a business that has a wrong foothold business model.

Focus on long-term business prosperity: Innovation comes with a risk of failure, usually not well tolerated in a market governed by a risk-allergic mindset. Due to the nature of job duty, some works are more creative (entrepreneur, artist, engineer, etc.), the other types of job are perhaps more compliant or calculative (“bean-counters”). We are what we think. Some mindsets are only concerned with quarterly ROIs and protecting passive shareholder equity to satisfy the preoccupations of investment capital. Innovation comes with a risk of failure, usually not well tolerated in a market governed by a risk-allergic mindset. Still, when business leaders, regardless of what type of mind you have, go beyond short-term gain, take a calculated risk and make a long-term investment, organizations have a better opportunity to shift from surviving to thriving mode.

Innovation is about moving forward. In any business, if you are not moving forward, you are moving backward. There is no standing still. Companies have to be prepared to lose some to gain more for the longer term. That’s the mantra for you to keep innovation alive and thrive in your organization.

Posted in: GAPs,Innovation,Principle/Practice,Talent Master