Sunday 6 November 2011
Twenty things you need to ask yourself about innovation
Australian companies are being told that they need to work smarter and more collaboratively to beat the current global economic slowdown; that they will need to be innovative. While we talk about it a lot, ask most people what innovation really means to their organisation and you could be met with a blank look.
A simple way to think about innovation is to think of an �innovation journey� that starts when the organisation is created but never ends.
The innovation journey describes how organisations develop their ability to innovate. The first step is about developing a basic strategy and the second about developing a core competency.
Firms that have successfully done this are better placed to start to identify and adopt useful new ideas from outside the business (Step 3).
Successfully adopting other people�s ideas can lead organisations to see new opportunities which may result in new products, processes, services or even a new business model being developed (Step 4).
Organisations that regularly innovate or develop ideas may then start to attract or even proactively seek out potential external collaborators to boost their innovation capability.
Collaboration offers the opportunity to work with other companies to develop ideas. It decreases the sole reliance on internal capability to develop ideas to improve and grow the business (Step 5).
The Innovation Journey
Take the Innovation Quiz to identify how innovative your company is and what can be done to improve.
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