The latest buzzword in the world of business in ‘innovation’. Essentially, this is the word used to describe a process, whereby an idea is selected and created, after which it is developed and turned into an accessible reality. Proper innovation management is key to the success of a business, but a lot of businesses still struggle to find way to encourage and enhance innovation. They must, therefore, come up with strategies to help them.
The Innovation Management Process
The first and most difficult thing to understand about innovation management is that there isn’t a clear end goal or measurable result. All you’re doing is investing your time, an intangible resource, into the future, equally intangible. You don’t know whether the innovative idea will be successful or even have any effect whatsoever. What you do know, however, is that innovation increases success’ probability and that, if done properly, the future is reasonably near. Yes, this is uncertain, but you still shouldn’t avoid it.
What you must learn, therefore, is how you can approach this project so that new ideas are fostered and so that they can be implemented into projects. The best way to do is to by making sure your team has full freedom to express themselves creatively. Even if 99.9% of those expressions turn out useless, team members have to be able to raise them for discussion. If anyone feels like their idea might not be good enough and should therefore not be expressed to the rest, you run the risk of losing out on the best idea ever.
Complete freedom is a scary term for managers and leaders, but you need to embrace it. And complete freedom also means that everybody gets to be part of the decision making process. Without that, people won’t feel listened to, so they will be reluctant to share anything either. Again, that means you will lose out on great ideas. What you should do instead is encourage more ideas. A rewards program for the most ideas that have been submitted, or a reward for the idea that is eventually chosen, is a great way to achieve that.
Your innovation will not bring immediate results. But embracing innovation is an innovation in and of itself, and one that does bring results very quickly. You can literally transform your organization in just a few days, from one with a rigid top down hierarchical system, to one on which everybody is on an equal footing when it comes to generating ideas and listening to each other. Remember that each team member has a unique position and view of the entire organization, which means they can come up with solutions that others simply wouldn’t have seen.
Innovation is difficult at the start. It often means changing a company culture, and people are generally reluctant to change. But once you get it going and it really takes off, your business will literally grow from strength to strength.
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