5 Tips to Innovate in your Company Right Now
I recently had the opportunity to watch Miguel Pinto speaking about innovation at the University of Pittsburgh in São Paulo.
It was a very inspiring talk and I would like to share some big ideas with you.
Read more bellow.
Today more than never the rhythm of adoption and change in organizations is getting faster and faster. For example It took 35 days to angry birds to reach 50 million users, while it took 75 year for the telephone, and 3,5 years for facebook to achieve the same amount of users.
Because of all this acceleration in the world, we have to manage uncertainty like never before.
Companies can not afford not to innovate anymore!
And Innovation is about creating value for stakeholders by improving Products, Services, Processes, Marketing Methods, or Management Methods. It could be something new in the world, in your market, or just in your organization, not just new but also better.
Here are some tips you can follow if you want to innovate in your company:
1. Think Differently and Break Rules
If you look carefully at your industry you see that probably there are many rules that every single player follows.
Identify those rules and break some of them, this could be a good way to innovate.
2. Pay attention to trends
One trend that is getting more and more common in different industries is the idea of Using instead of Having.
If you look to the way people are listening to music nowadays for example, you will see that most people are paying to use music in Spotify instead of buying CDs or mp3 songs.
The same thing is happening to movies, people now pay for a subscription in Netflix instead of buying DVDs. And the same thing is start to happen in the software, car and bike industries and many more.
3. Understand your customer unmet needs
Ford once said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” That is why sometimes it is not enough to ask customers what they want, you need to surprise them instead.
4. Test Hypothesis and Improve
Today is cheaper and easier than ever to get ideas out there and test what works and does not work. So make it happen! Put your ideas out there, and learn, and them do it again until you really get it.
5. Innovation should became part of your culture
It is not about to innovate just once. Polaroid did that and its not here anymore. It is about creating a culture of continuous innovation. It is about making it part of your identify and daily concerns.
There is not a single right answer on how to innovate in your organization. Every context is unique, so you must do the hard work to discover what works best for you. For example, you can have a innovation team, an entire department, or you can even have people spread around your teams focusing on innovation. Find out what works for you.
What are you waiting?
Start innovating right now!
