Growth through innovation – buzzphrase or reality?

Follow the trend or create a new one? How company should act in order to be called innovative and pioneering?

Below you may find research-based action tips for improvement of innovation performance in your very company.

1: Conceive of innovation as a business discipline, and then manage and execute it systematically. Please make it an end-to-end uniform process, from insight development and idea generation to development and marketplace launch.

2: Craft a precise definition of innovation’s role in the overall corporate strategy based on the company’s industry, market, and competitive environment. Define specific goals. What innovations do you need to build a sustainable competitive position and what value are the innovations expected to generate? Make innovation definition broad enough to no one be let off the hook. It is perfect to end up in the situation when [innovation is about continuously finding new sources of value and therefore executives are looking at the processes they currently have in place for identifying new sources of value, setting up teams to explore and execute around those sources, managing the teams, and measuring results.]

3: Focus much more time and resources on breakthrough, long-term, game-changing innovation. Play for high stake delivering breakthrough innovations based on “big bet” initiatives and spend less time on incremental innovation that yields only short-term benefits.

4: Take more risks, reward failure, and encourage continuous improvement. Thinking big and acting big will lead you to breakthrough innovations. Cultivate such skills and make them a corporate culture. It’s vital.

5: Measure innovation performance and results as you do other business functions, such as marketing, strategy, and operations. Keep your eyes open all the time: track detailed, disciplined, and consistent metrics about innovation performance, measure past success and estimate the future market impact of new products.

6: Focus on the customer experience and less on technology. Zero in on a problem looking for a technology solution rather than a technology solution looking for a problem. Listen and hear the very voice of the customer. For this use ethnographic, best-practice observational customer understanding techniques. You can’t develop something just because a room full of engineers think it’s cool.

7: Embrace open innovation and open innovation tools. Use external sources as far as keeping all innovation activities within your company is a recipe for failure.

8: Encourage idea generation from everywhere, both inside and outside your company. Include everyone from the highest levels of the company to the lowest. Often the most innovative ideas are submitted by junior employees.

9: Consider appointing a chief innovation officer and setting up a uniformity of command for corporate innovation accountability. As per research [there is a direct correlation between the level of successful innovation within companies and the presence of a chief innovation officer or any responsible.] Designating an executive to be accountable and leading innovation execution report results in [dramatically higher satisfaction levels across all aspects of their innovation performance.]

10: Have a dedicated budget for innovation. You will need an adequate level of resources to fund the innovation infrastructure. Just appointing a chief innovation officer isn’t enough.

To sum up the above stated try to combine innovative sole and brains, thoughts and actions and you will be able to achieve growth through innovation. What do you think of this? Would you use these tips or just consider them to be high-flown words?

Welcome with your opinions!