Articles

Innovation Musings

Innovation is a buzzword today in the corporate world. Every organization wants to be innovative. They want to sell innovative products and services!

Genuine innovation creates lots of genuine value to the organization, customers & society. It is about value added to customers & society by the application of creative ideas which are commercialized.

Innovation can be in any of the following dimensions:

• Products & Services
• Processes
• Business Model

Innovation in Products & Services and sometimes in Processes require high investment in technology, but innovation in Business Model isn’t technology dependent(most of the times).

Innovation in business model aka Value innovation is about how an organization can currently enhance value to its customers and reduce cost of sales. It’s not doing either, but doing both together. There are different ways of accomplishing this which are discussed in some of my other articles.

Here are some startling facts about Innovation that can disrupt your retrospection about innovation.

• Over 50% of all innovation is focused developing innovative Produces & Services
• Nearly 20% of innovation is focused towards Processes
• Over 70 % of ideas for innovation during interaction with customers, business partners, suppliers & competition
• Only less than 20 % of ideas for innovation comes from employee forums such as brainstorming, suggestion forums, etc

So the fountainhead of innovation are customers, business partners, suppliers & competition. Organizations successful in innovation focus in the process of embedding a conducive culture, leadership commitment, open communication channel with customers and business partners and a lot of patience.