How to Drive Innovation in Your Business

What the companies have to do to drive innovation? Innovation is the implementation of new ideas that create value. There are four aspects with different weightings to get into the right innovation process, namely the purpose (10 percent), i.e. the transformation of business, the use of new markets or new technologies; the processes (20 percent), such as the focus on adjacent value creation areas, a gradual improvement of the products or nearby markets and customers; the employees and the portfolio as an innovation pipeline (70 percent) to make improvements, extensions, variations or cost reductions or to strengthen the focus on existing markets and customers.

Where from the innovative ideas come?

While looking for new opportunities or customer needs, companies can take different paths that are more or less disruptive. The classic method is to search for value drivers, obvious opportunities, new methods or technical possibilities from which new products, services or business models can be derived.

Besides, companies can also be inspired by innovations from suppliers and partners, and also from competitors. The unexpected use of products also provides interesting insights. With a little imagination, innovative examples from other industries can also be transferred to your own business or new technology trends can be exploited. In this context, however, new technologies can also deliver the opposite effect. Some people are rather sceptical about 5G and radiation, for example. Even if there is no evidence for this and studies usually cannot prove any health effects, as a company you have to be prepared for such resentments because purchase decisions are based more on belief than on facts. The most disruptive method of creating innovative ideas is unthinkable thinking. Here you add restrictions for the business or leave them out and ask according to the question “What happens if?”
Many companies are now taking the opportunity to promote innovations with workshops and the like.
The reverse destructive strategies are a popular exercise in ideation workshops. The focus here is on what a start-up or a competitor would have to do to with their own core business and what can be done about it. Tools can also help, especially in larger organizations. In the area of ​​strategy and planning, such a tool could be the classic SWOT analysis can help planning. Hackathons or certain challenges help to find ideas.