Innovation-Critical: Understand the Problems You Want to Tackle
Whatever your goal or your role, innovation should be part of your daily activities. When you think of innovation, no idea is too big or too small, as you will see in the next section, but, how you approach this depends on your business goals.
Depending on the goals identified, different types of innovation will be suitable.
To maximize your efforts and the chances of success, your innovation vision will need to match your corporate strategy. Always link your ideas to your business strategy.
For example, innovation can help organizations with:
Solving a problem: from a business strategy point of view you might want to find a way of dealing with declining sales. Innovation can help you reframe such problems as opportunities and help you align existing customer needs to your goals.
Boosting your bottom or top line: as part of your business strategy, you might choose to focus on this by reducing costs and improving profitability, efficiency, or productivity. Innovation could present itself in the form of product or supply chain improvements or new product lines.
Adapting strategy to emerging priorities: "adapt or die" is one of the sayings we hear across companies frequently. In this scenario, organizations decide an innovative approach is key to keeping up-to-date with new technologies or competitor activities.
Identifying areas for improvement or expansion: with competition coming from many different places, it’s important to innovate not only to drive improved processes, but also to serve existing and potential customers or markets better.