Point of view
The need for businesses to change is constant. This can be in response to a diverse set of pressures including growth, competition, customer expectations or sustained performance. While many businesses look to what others are doing there are a number of brave business owners and leaders that look to innovation. Innovation is easy to say and much harder to do.
Innovation is typically linked with creativity. Unfortunately being creative and having great ideas is not enough to bring about a change in business. Great ideas are just the starting point. Without the ability to execute on these ideas you are left with plenty of creativity and little to no innovation. Our point of view is that great innovators are those who can bring together the great ideas with the ability to execute.
There are many pitfalls and traps between idea and implementation. Our role is helping you navigate these pitfalls, to take some of the risks out of innovation and to allow creativity and good management practices to come together.
Some of the pitfalls we typically encounter include:
- A poor definition of the problem/opportunity – too often great ideas are hatched in a vacuum. They are the result of too little analysis, little to no observation and very little market testing. In our mind this is a failure to gain appropriate levels of insight.
- Ideas that are developed in isolation – organisations are often captured by the myth of the lone inventor spending time in a garage. Innovation is a participation sport. Just like any sport it requires some rules and a playing field. The ability to engage in an open and engaging ideas process requires practice and great facilitation.
- Great ideas remain just that, ideas – the transition from a creative process to a business planning process is where we see most ideas stall. While this is a great place to cull ideas unfortunately most stall because the business simply does not know to move them forward.
- Implementation blow-out – there are many risks associated with innovation. A blow out during implementation is perhaps the most significant. Businesses often rush to implementation without thinking through the consequences, investments are not planned in a robust fashion and the business is not really prepared to deliver the change.
These pitfalls and more can be managed to provide an environment where the risks are lower and the outcomes more certain. While the risk cannot be eliminated a robust approach can give you the confidence to try something different and to innovate.
Digital Disruption - Lead Partner of Innovation, Grant Frear, asks Frank Farrall how to get big organisations to engage with digital.
