Innovation is one of the three ways to renew businesses. Businesses must renew their business to improve revenue/margins, save costs, increase service or reach their strategic goals.
There are three types of business renewing: 1. Inventing is doing things new in the world, 2. Innovation is implementing things that exist in the world but new is for the organization. And finally, 3. Improvements are activities that an organization is already doing and improving them.
Innovation is often focused on trends and technologies but in the end it solves business problems or challenges businesses face. And mostly the real challenge with innovation is to engage with the right people, find the right problem, find the right solution, develop the right solution and implement it well.
There are many hurdles on the path to successful innovation. Sometimes, people fall in love with the solution instead of the problem. Sometimes the right people are not included in the process. Sometimes the solutions are simple to complex or time/money consuming to implement.
Therefore, there is a need for a proper innovation process. The process helps to:
Define where to focus innovation on
Engage people, collect ideas and stimulate collaboration
Score ideas on organization and topic-specific criteria and select the best ideas to implement
Step by step, develop the idea, concept, and solution to an experiment/pilot.
Implement the result into the business where it delivers value.
Measure the investments and results of innovation.
In the end, innovation is a numbers game, just as many other parts of every business and we need to make smart decisions on what ideas we follow up on, decide when to stop an innovation, and when to push forward. But most importantly a team that works together on build in and maintain a very valuable innovation engine that runs smoothly and delivers continued business value.
A fool with a tool is still a fool. Experts know they need the right tools to do the job.