Top 5 actions for innovating in your company
Concord from California Academy of Science
“If you aren’t failing you aren’t learning and if you aren’t learning, you aren’t improving.”
Has innovation become a cliché? What does it really mean? People have many different ideas and here are just two:
- Innovation is successfully applied ideas.
- Disruptive innovation involves the utter disturbance of the status quo.
In a disruptive and volatile B2B world, senior decision makers need to improve results much faster than ever. But growing revenue and profits in a sustainable way and creating more value for customers is becoming harder. So, everyone is searching for some innovation to help them overcome their increasing challenges.
Innovation Checklist
What are the top 5 practical actions to ensure innovation becomes part of your culture. Instead of just another buzz word for managers when they need something to say!
- Involve everyone. Innovation is possible in all areas of your business. So, look everywhere and at everything: people and processes, as well as products and services.
- Be curious and question everything. Encourage a culture of ‘no question is a stupid question’. Only by being curious can you find a better way.
- Don’t ignore ‘far-fetched pipe-dream’ ideas. While they may not be practical in their raw form – they can ignite someone else to define a more practical idea.
- Listen to your customers to find what you need to improve – use feedback from customer surveys and interviews. Read all the comments because free text responses can be the most illuminating.
- Don’t fight the failure. Embrace your mistakes and turn them into something valuable.
In an ever-changing marketplace, to leverage opportunities or overcome problems you need to achieve better results faster, now and in the future. So, now is the time to embrace practical innovation for you to achieve better results. Read our blog: What is your innovation appetite? And discover where you are now. Then use the Top 5 checklist to move your company forward using innovation.
How can you make your people feel responsible for innovation? To ensure everyone feels responsible for innovation you need to include people from all areas of the company in all stages of innovation. Not just creating ideas, but choosing the best solutions and implementing these solutions.
“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.”
Diana Kander shows why a plan is just a starting point for innovation, from where you experiment and gain feedback to keep improving and become successful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pii8tTx1UYM
Innovation is important, no matter how cliché it has become. To make it work in your business culture means everyone needs to get their hands dirty and play their part. If you need to kick start your innovation journey, take a look at Rapid Results from Teams.