How Businesses Can Innovate More

Innovation management sounds like a term that does not necessarily allow people to get their creative juices going.

At times, businesses get it all wrong by over-optimizing and streamlining a process to come up with new ideas, products, and services. This does not necessarily have to be the case, though?

Nowadays people are focusing on creating a culture around holacratic leaders and having employees give suggestions for business growth.

What Is Innovation In Business?

Innovation is business is nothing more that finding out what can your organization do to excel within the industry.

The benefit of having a lot of like-minded individuals work within an office is that it makes it easier for them to collaborate and work with one another.  When the psychometric build-up of a team is great, it allows for teams to work better and more unique ideas come to fruition.

But before your company invests in building great teams, you have to find out  how to out-innovate better than competitors, more importantly, how can innovation be recognized in your industry.

These are the ways to be an outlier within your business/industry:

  • Define what is innovation in your business
    • Is it a mindset, a service, a new HR idea
  • Find out how can you measure this new idea
    • What tools and metrics can you use to find out if your ideas work?
  • Use innovation management software to optimize a flow
    • This will keep a team-first mentality when coming up, measuring, and organizing ideas.

Every company is different so make sure that your innovation strategy is sound with the culture of your company.

Regardless of how you may define innovation within your business, it’s important to know how to get there. There’s an astonishing TedTalk that mentions how some of the most brilliant minds have come up with some of the greatest innovations and tactics.

Would give it a listen:

 

If you’d like just to know the jist of it, he lets the audience know that all the brightest minds had routines that allowed them to be creative leaders in their industries.

That along with the fact that certain inventions that have changed the world have been found by accident. So it’s safe to say that if you’re overthinking about creating something new, the best thing to do is to step away from it for a bit.

I’ll get into how to properly think out your innovative process in a bit.

Less Pressure To “Do” And More Emphasis To “Think.”

One of the mistakes that young startups and small businesses do is that they focus on trying to do a lot in a short amount of time, as opposed to thinking of the best process.

It’s like the old military adage that is known as the five P’s:

How the 5 p's can encourage innovation in business

It’s important to strategize as opposed to just get stuff done. This is the difference between treating tasks as things that will help a company’s vision or just treating them as busy-work.

Nothing will boost employee engagement more than having a creative culture for talented employees, but it still has to be organized chaos. Making sure projects are well thought-out and planned is the beauty of working and creating new projects.

As mentioned in the TedTalk above, some of the best projects are found by accident, yet clumsily not keeping track of the process of how to get there will leave you fumbling around trying to think of all the ways you got there.

Make sure you keep track of everything you’re doing. It’s important to have innovation notes and analytics to improve the way you develop new concepts. It is one step closer to building an agile culture, that can create faster and better.

Having an agile culture isn’t necessarily about doing less, it’s about thinking things through and making sure that you are working smart, not hard. Believe it or not, it’s one of the main reason a large amount of Americans are leaving the corporate life behind.

So, if you want to innovate better, make sure to strategize and looking at the root of a project to gain a better understanding why an innovation or thought-process will benefit the company.

Make sure that you and your team are strategizing first, and then using the insights and gameplan to learn and set up a proper timeline for the success of your future project.

How Is Your Company Innovating?

What is your company doing to be a leader in the industry? Are you out-innovating your competition? Let us know how your company pushes the lines and colors outside of the lines.