Innovation is defined as the process of turning ideas into solutions through certain methods referred to as the innovation process.
Business innovation matters
From a business perspective, innovation is what fuels the organization to change. With change as the only constant, any organization that does not change can soon fail. That is why organizations need to be able to adapt to changes, to constantly innovate and think long-term.
To understand how the innovation process works in the business perspective, there are five concepts to remember:
- Challenge: This phase is where you plan the innovation project, involve stakeholders, and frame and communicate the innovation challenge.
- Ideate: This simply means generating ideas.
- Converge: This is where you take a wide range of ideas and eliminate or combine them into a compelling design.
- Prototype: This is where an early sample or model of a product or services is created to be replicated or learned from.
- Test: This is the phase where you try out the workability and efficacy of your prototype
Creating value through innovation
Increasing business value through innovation is important for the organization’s success. Innovation challenges faced by organizations can be addressed and examined by frameworks which lead to value being generated by the ideation process. Innovation performance frameworks such as the following help organizations create values through innovation:
- Product innovation strategy
- Portfolio management
- Idea-to-launch process
- Climate and culture
The objective of business innovation
The objective of business innovation is simple yet powerful: it is to create, deliver and capture value through innovation. Let’s examine what value creation, delivery and capture entail:
Create Value
Feasibility is one objective of business innovation. The important questions to ask are what the product or service does, how is it made, and how do you build it.
Deliver Value
Interest should also be considered. Who is the intended market of the product or service? How do you get them and catch their attention? How is the sale completed?
Capture Value
Profitability, repeatability, and scalability of a product or service should not be ignored.
Business innovation is a deciding factor for an organization’s success or failure. Organizations that get comfortable with the norm or their usual ways of doing things and avoid changes get left behind and eventually fail. This is the powerful message of business innovation.
