What does Innovation mean to your business?

Albert Einstein once said “Innovation is not the product of logical thought, although the result is tied to logical structure.”

In the modern world, unless we are happy being a commodity, Innovation is our main source of competitive advantage – doing things better, more quickly and more cost effectively than our competitors. So how do we gear ourselves up for Innovation?

Organisations are ecosystems where everything impacts everything. Depending on where the organisation wishes to go (its strategic direction) it will put together people, processes, technologies and information to get there.

If the goal is to compete using Innovation it needs to put the people, processes, technologies and information in place to ensure that it is better at innovating than its competitors.

There are many types of Innovation.

• Product Innovation – looking for new products for the market; probably the best known and the start of most Innovation projects.

• Market Innovation refers to looking for new markets for existing products. A good example of this is blue ocean strategy where new uses and therefore new markets are found by tweaking existing products as SWATCH did when they re-positioned their wrist watch as a fashion icon and started competing in the fashion market.

• Process Innovation is also popular, when organisations look for better or cheaper ways to do the same thing.

• Business Model Innovation is when a company moves from one way of driving revenue to another. Organisations may move from a straight forward sale environment to a value-added service offering with annuity.

Modern innovation models include Management Innovation, where organisations have changed the way that they manage knowledge workers so that they get the most out of their creativity, knowledge, collaboration and Innovation skills.

When we create Innovation ecosystems we need to configure our people, processes, technologies and information to achieve product, process, market, business model and management innovation that helps us leap frog our competition and that requires logical thought and logical structure.