“Innovation is creating something novel and useful to achieve a particular objective.”
“Innovation has been around since the beginning of time. It will continue to be part of how we evolve. It is necessary for sustainable growth.”
“Innovation is shaping the world and everything around us.”
“It’s about a different way of doing things more effectively.”
These are some of the views given in our recent Innovation Masterclass with senior managers and executives, mainly from the food and agricultural industry. With similar personal definitions, they all agreed that innovation is essential for businesses to be successful in the modern world. With the massive technological advancements taking place, companies are being forced to adapt and expand more than ever before – or as the saying goes, ‘adapt or die’.
Participants currently experienced varying levels of innovation within their organisation and identified several impeding issues, including:
- Misunderstanding of innovation
- No clear strategy
- Lack of buy-in from leadership
- Insufficient structures and tools to facilitate information sharing
- Too cost-focused
- No time to innovate
- Lack of recognition for innovative ideas
Issues like these need to be addressed within organisations for new ideas to thrive. Concepts that participants highlighted relating to online expansion, the adoption of future technology, collaborations to co-develop solutions, improvement of capacity and efficiency, and reduced costs, for example.
However, to do this, innovation must be at every level of the organisation and a strong culture of innovation established. You can read more about how to do this in my recent article “Create a thriving innovative organisational culture with these 6Ps!” Without an active innovation culture established from the top, organisations fall into stagnation and lose out to more innovative competitors.
But once organisations have established a culture of innovation, how do they spot new ideas and streamline the innovation process? Our simplified methodology is that we need to:
- Understand the situation, get to know the people involved, and prioritise the issues at hand.
- Reframe the top issue, and craft the challenge statement.
- Generate creative ideas to address the challenge statement, and prioritise the ideas.
- Make a mock-up of the top idea, test it, refine it, and present it to stakeholders.
- Identify and consult key stakeholders to incorporate their views.
We all play a critical role in creating the right environment for innovation to flourish, especially leaders, at both the organisational and personal level. Once this culture is created, we need to know how to spot and then act upon our innovative concepts.
So what you need to ask yourself is what is innovation to you, and how can your business be more innovative?
Find out more by contacting us at Lim-Loges & Masters.
Innovator and problem-solving practitioner with over 20 years’ experience, Joel is experienced in Design Thinking, Service Design, Change Management, Behavioural Insights and Lean Processing. He helps organisations deliver higher quality services; diagnose and creatively solve systemic issues to enhance operations, and gain competitive advantage by opening blue ocean markets.
If you would like to chat to Joel about your corporate innovation requirements, please drop him a line at joelng@limlogesmasters.com
