Business Innovation

Usually businesses tend to "bounce" away from the idea to implement an innovation strategy, especially the capital outlay in mind, innovation remains a frustrating pursuit in many businesses.

*Innovation initiatives frequently fail, and successful innovators have a hard time sustaining their performance. Why is it so hard to build and maintain the capacity to innovate? The reasons go much deeper than the commonly cited cause: a failure to execute. The problem with innovation improvement efforts is rooted in the lack of an innovation strategy.

A strategy is nothing more than a commitment to a set of coherent, mutually reinforcing policies or behaviors aimed at achieving a specific competitive goal. Good strategies promote alignment among diverse groups within an organization, clarify objectives and priorities, and help focus efforts around them.

Companies regularly define their overall business strategy (their scope and positioning) and specify how various functions—such as marketing, operations, finance will support it.

Without an innovation strategy, innovation improvement efforts can easily become a grab bag of much-touted best practices.  The problem is that an organization’s capacity for innovation stems from an innovation system: a coherent set of interdependent processes and structures that dictates how the company searches for novel problems and solutions, synthesizes ideas into a business concept and product designs, and selects which projects get funded. Individual best practices involve trade-offs. And adopting a specific practice generally requires a host of complementary changes to the rest of the organization’s innovation system. A company without an innovation strategy won’t be able to make trade-off decisions and choose all the elements of the innovation system.

Without an innovation strategy, different parts of an organization can easily wind up pursuing conflicting priorities—even if there’s a clear business strategy. Sales representatives hear daily about the pressing needs of the biggest customers. Marketing may see opportunities to leverage the brand through complementary products or to expand market share through new distribution channels.

Diverse perspectives are critical to successful innovation. But without a strategy to integrate and align those perspectives around common priorities, the power of diversity is blunted or, worse, becomes self-defeating. 

(*Source Summary HBR - Harvard Business Review)

Cubic Advisory (SA) will guide you through a robust innovative process, focus on Innovative Strategic Business Processes (ISBPs), that will "remould" your business through intelligent innovation.