Quick to Innovate
Written by CJ Malmsten
It is widely accepted that innovation and creativity are critical in the modern business landscape. More than just a fleeting trend or buzzword, being innovative is necessary to keep apace in the ever-changing and increasingly competitive environment organisations find themselves in.
But what actually is innovation?
The International Association of Innovation Professionals describes innovation as “the creation of new value…the goal of innovation is to bring the idea to a productive position; whether this is a profitable product or simply a better way of doing something. It can improve quality, a service, a process or a management model…it is the addition of value, even if there is not a monetary reward. When no monetary reward is achieved, we would assume that the innovation is an improvement to an individual, group or society”.
Innovation is not merely the creation of new ideas – it is the actual implementation of them, whether they are new products or process improvement.
The key areas of innovation include:
Making new products
Using an existing technology for a new purpose (e.g. using AR to find Pokémon, VR to train for disasters on oil rigs)
Creating a new business model that capitalises on untapped value (e.g. Uber, Airbnb)
Delivering to a new location/under-served market (e.g. water filtration in a developing country)
Scientific discoveries (e.g. a new pharmaceutical drug)
Whereas traditional problem-solving can be a slow and arduous process, based on more intuition than data and bound by laborious corporate policy and procedures and heavy resource allocation, innovation requires a degree of short-term uncertainty, tolerance for failure, comfort with the unknown and fewer resources (mostly time).
One simple methodology that can be applied in corporate, private and government contexts to create innovation loops is Lean Startup’s “Build-Measure-Learn”. A more cost-effective framework for testing ideas by building something small for customers or stakeholders to try, measuring the results, and learning from these to inform continuous improvement and the next iteration – with the ultimate goal of refining your product/service to deliver exactly what your customers want/need. It enables you to identify when things go wrong, before it’s too late to turn an initial failure into a long-term success.
Innovation doesn’t always mean massive transformation – it can often start with incremental changes. Some useful questions to consider when gathering insights about stakeholders and opportunities for small tweaks:
What daily experiences at your organisation do you observe?
If you were to target just one of these, what would it be?
What minor thing can you ‘tweak’ to produce a different experience of outcome for the people you serve?
By reflecting on these questions you can identify possibilities for building and testing your ideas quickly and cost-effectively...and ultimately implementing innovation to achieve increased value for your organisation and stakeholders.