What differentiates winners from losers? Winners don’t leave things up to chance, not in sports, music, or business, and certainly not when it comes to innovation. You need a structured innovation management approach to ensure that innovating does not become something akin to gambling. Below are five reasons why a structured innovation management approach is essential.
5 reasons for a structured innovation management approach:
1. The weakest link determines performance
Innovation is a process that starts with idea generation and ends implementing and scaling the new offering. It is great to be really good at idea generation, but if you struggle with the implementation, then being good at idea generation is a waste of time and energy, as too few of these ideas get implemented. The weakest link in the innovation process determines your output. A structured approach ensures you are efficient and effective in all aspects of the innovation process.
2. Not urgent today, but important for tomorrow
Unless your firm is about to go under and innovation is your last resort, innovation is rarely urgent. Yet innovation is important. Without innovation few organizations are able to survive in the long term. Since more immediate matters typically consume our busy workday, innovation becomes something for Friday afternoon or next week. A structured approach to innovating ensures this important, yet not always urgent, task does not get postponed indefinitely until it's too late.
3. Incentives and rewards
Innovation is teamwork. We can all name numerous successful products, but who knows the names of their inventors? By the way, Steve Jobs did not create the iPhone or iTunes; employees of Apple did. Many of Apple's innovations failed, and very few became successful blockbuster products such as the iPhone or iTunes. Often, these failures were needed to realize the final success. For example, it took many failed versions of hand-held organizers for the Palm Pilot to become successful. A structured approach to innovation ensures lessons are learned from failures, and employees involved in innovation are rewarded appropriately for their efforts, for success as well as failure.
In these organizations, the most successful and high-in-demand employees are tasked with maintaining the status quo and innovating to ensure tomorrow’s growth. Without a structured innovation process, it is impossible to do both of these tasks well.
References
Palm Pilot failures: CHM Revolution." The PalmPilot -. Accessed. 16 June 2014