Looking Ahead...
Random Quote for the Week of December 3rd, 2007:
"Never look back, unless you are planning to go that way" - Henry David Thoreau
Looking Ahead "Conceptlet":
It's that time of year again...time to look ahead and plan your future. While there is no "off season" when thinking about innovation initiatives, using the typically annual event of strategic planning serves as a natural checkpoint to ensure that your innovation program and your overall organizational direction are in alignment. So, with that mindset, let's take a look at some strategies for organizational creativity and innovation:
Organizational Creativity:
- Find naturally creative people within your organization and provide them with freedom and "air cover" to explore
- Adjust your bonus or other reward program to ensure that creative ideas (used or not) are publically rewarded
- Examine your organizational culture for unnecessary formality that may be damaging creativity
- Create a learning environment and encourage all employees to stretch their minds
- Encourage people to take risks and reward spectacular failures
Organizational Innovation:
- Match the natually creative people with the "doers" in your organization and give them the money and time to move ideas to reality
- Ensure that your reward program includes rewards for ideas AND for profitable products/services resulting from new ideas
- Establish a methodology or process to ensure that ideas are consistently evaluated against the organizational strategy
- Encourage employees to speak with your customers and your competitors customers, use your competitor's products/services, watch how people interact with your product/service...in essence, serve as your market research department
- Evaluate the ideas that you are allowing to move forward and ensure that you have a blend of market changing, market mover and market maintenance ideas within your innovation portfolio
You'll notice that I paired the five "creativity" strategies with the five "innovation" strategies. Remember, every single innovation needs an idea...but not every idea will become an innovation. Confused? Need a refresher?
Creativity = The mental exercise of generating ideas to solve a problem -OR- Spending money/effort to generate ideas
Innovation = The action of converting an idea into a physical product or service that serves a need and generates a financial benefit -OR- Spending ideas to generate money
As you prepare your strategic planning sessions and look ahead to 2008, some of you will be jumping off the high dive into the innovation waters, others will be dipping their toe, while still others will remain in their beach chair. Understand that innovation is not a business fad...it is, and always has been, a constant throughout the course of competitive business history. In order to stay one step ahead, capture a market, develop the next proprietary eponym or simply just improve your product/service to satisfy existing customers, you need innovation. And in order to drive innovation, you need ideas. While creativity drives purposeful thought and innovation drives purposeful action, both require an environment that allows for each to flourish.
Make your 2008 Innovation Strategic Plan successful by ensuring alignment with your overall organization goals and by fostering a climate of creative thought, collaboration, calculated risk taking, freedom to fail and most importantly, action on your most promising ideas.
Have a GREAT week!!!
Make your 2008 Innovation Strategic Plan successful by ensuring alignment with your overall organization goals and by fostering a climate of creative thought, collaboration, calculated risk taking, freedom to fail and most importantly, action on your most promising ideas.
Have a GREAT week!!!
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