Innovation, new ideas, new ways of doing things, better ways to engage with customers, better ways of working as a team, finding new markets, new partners, insights…..etc.
All of these things can happen by themselves and often do. Like the time that you find yourself in the shower and are struck by that great idea ……that eureka moment.
However, most of the time those ideas happen more by accident and randomly than by deliberate action.
Real, continuous innovation doesn’t happen by accident so needs to be a deliberate and integral part of your growth strategy.
The two main challenges to embedding real and continuous innovation into a business tends to be twofold:
- Time
- Money/Resources
The first challenge is getting caught up in the day to day operations of business and not putting aside time to think individually or as a team. A great and well-known example of a company putting this into action is Google and their 20 percent time. This is where Google engineers are able to spend one day a week working on projects that aren’t necessarily in their job descriptions. They use the time to do things like develop something new or fix something that is broken.
Secondly, many companies can try to solve or source innovation problems by throwing resources or money at the issue. However, have you ever heard the saying ‘Necessity is the mother of Invention‘? Often, the best solutions to problems or new ways of doing things have come from situations where there have been no or very limited resources available. Can you simulate these conditions in your innovation?
What are you doing to make your innovation real and continuous?
