Everyone is running after innovation, they talk of innovation. When you ask people about their company’s “Corporate Innovation Strategy”, you may see black out onto their faces. Or you may get an answer that they are involved with good initiatives like brainstorming sessions, open innovation competitions, and idea generation schemes. You may even get a wispy reply when you ask them how many of their ideas are commercialized and how many ideas are being experimented and got serious attention and funding. Thus there is a loop hole in innovation which could really be reflected in practices.
I am writing this article for companies, start ups and budding entrepreneurs giving them the crux of innovation. How innovation looks like, how it is connected to the economy and how they can play with innovation. You are perhaps etymologically right if you call innovation as a radical change or a breakthrough or a continuous increment in idea. But what it is which drives the innovation, is it the real fruit? It is the operational process which leads to better results in innovation. Innovation is the shortest distance covered between two points. By shortest distance I mean, there may be infinite number of ways by which you can commercialize your idea with lot of complexities involved in the path. But incremental innovation is the shortest one.
Lets talk of Google, have you ever thought of typing a word in to the search bar and nothing happened. How Google manages to give the best results in just a blink of an eye. The reason why it is popular among the masses is because Google is simple. Half a million servers racked up in clusters at data centers around the globe scanning the websites with a huge speed and giving up the results.
Companies do think that An Idea can change their life, and when they catch any innovative glitch they start initiatives like online suggestion boxes, brainteaser program and some innovation programs to refine it further. And thus this prevails the innovation planning gap in the boulevard.
In a survey by McKinsey over 2000 executives in the year 2010, 84% agreed that innovation is really important for future growth of the company. 40% said that they generate new ideas on an ad hoc basis. And 57% end up in saying that they need new big ideas while executing well with the current one. Though all of them agree that innovation is important but hardly a few spend their efforts and time in processing them. Thus a proper operational queue needs to be created and monitored.
It’s not only about the idea. It is in your pocket and you need to pick it up. What is important is a process. Innovation process is like a pyramid with all the faces transparent in nature. At the base you can find a lot many ideas but to reach at the topmost point, a road needs to be decided. Incremental innovations with the existing product can be pumped up without a delay. When you set a map and reach up to the middle, it contains a huge opportunities which give space to venture and experiment the same. And moving up on the operational excellence path when you reach at the peak, future growth needs to be diversified with the proper management attention. Innovation pyramid is thus active and creative. A perfect example of this is Virtual Worlds of IBM.
Simplicity is the key to Ideate and Innovate. Companies spend a lot on R&D to ideate. And I am not complaining that one should avoid. It is good, but the question is HOW? You might have come across the way people saying “This is so simple, How come that didn’t hit my mind?” I give you a thumb rule, generating a gap and create a need in the present world or predict the future needs and simplify those immediately. Its all about satisfying the needs and wants which are the two hands of any economy.
Throughout my article I have been talking about operational excellence and process but how to create one. By this time we are aware that ideas create the base and to innovate them we need an engine which could propel through. Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple originally gave his idea of personal computers to Hewlett-Packard. Since HP lacked in management process to innovate the one, the idea did not work out. Later, Wozniak decided to work on this idea with his friend Steve Jobs, and they went to commercialize the product. The rest is history. Work with the three sticks and taste the real innovation.
Ask yourself- You probably talk of leadership and commitment but how often you experiment these in a change. Do you actually spend time out of your schedule to mentor the viable projects? Individualism, you are the competition to yourself. And leadership traits need to be identified throughout the organization. You need to start paying attention to each idea and find the shortest ways of commercializing it.
Secondly, Infrastructural requirements are obvious which are ready to support innovation process. You need to know how long you can go with your idea in order to propel adequate resources like prototype development, experimenting, logistics and so forth. This will help you to deeply analyze the idea and take you to the next stage.
Thirdly, an effective process needs to be chalked out starting from identifying the idea, aligning it with refining scheme, planning to market it, developing R&D tools for incremental change etc. Identifying the opportunities within the idea and allocating the proper resources give a reason to innovate for various kinds of innovations.
Thus fuel of operational excellence needs to be given to the engine of ideas to run the vehicle of innovation.
“Find a need and fill it.”
