It’s everywhere! The term innovation is being thrown around like a beach ball at a Buffalo Bandits game! It looks as though it’s in every ad we see, hear and read. Some of us have incorporated it into the names of our companies, products and services. It’s the buzzword, the jargon, even the slang of the current business cycle.
Our Governments want us to be more innovative so, in order to be demonstrative about our innovations, we include it every brochure or owner’s manual we print, we include it every speech we make, heck we even have it embroidered on our company shirts. After all, who’d want to miss out on a government funding program because we hadn’t let the world know just how innovative we really are? But are we? Are we really innovative? Do we have what it takes to lead our companies on to the next phase of growth? The statistics say no. In fact 60% of us don’t believe we have what it takes to lead our organizations much beyond where they are TODAY, yet alone well in to the future.
Great ideas bubble up! It’s a cliché, sure, but it’s true, the most innovative and profitable ideas that your organization can create start at the bottom as a series of little underdeveloped thoughts and notions. As they rise they join other idea bubbles to become a more complete idea offering until finally they all join forces and become one huge, great big idea. But those little bubbles don’t come from you. As the leader of your organization it’s up to you to provide a breeding ground for ideas to be created, discussed and nurtured or negated. As the leader of your organization it’s up you to ensure the each idea has the right resources allocated to it at the right time and ultimately it’s up to you to decide which of those ideas will meet your strategic criteria.
Simply put, innovation is the best use of existing inventions to fulfill a need in the marketplace. That need can be an obvious consumer (externally facing) need or it can be a much less obvious internally facing need to be more efficient at what we do. That innovation can be a disruptive new product or service that will give us a decided advantage over our competition or it can be a much more subtle internal, incremental innovation that will increase profitability in order to allow us to innovate once again.
So, while we hear the word innovation about 80 million times a day and everyone, including Innovators Alliance encourages you to innovate, it’s important that you not lose sight of the meaning of the word and its relationship to your strategic plan. Then, be sure to breathe a breath of life in to your company by doing something that is truly innovative to your organization!
For more information on how to deal with the innovation storm that’s hit us … call us, email us, or join, Innovators Alliance.
- Are you BIG in your organization? The Big Idea Guru! - December 10, 2014
- Get Out! Innovators Alliance at SNOLab Part 2 - December 3, 2014
- A Break for Adventure: Innovators Alliance at SNOLab Part 1 - November 26, 2014
