Is your company doing innovation right?
If there is one word that could be regarded as the most abused, overused cliché buzzword of our times, it would be the word “innovation”. You hear it all the time, everywhere you look and everywhere you go. It has been repeated ad nauseum that sometimes, one could easily forget what it stands for. However, if you’re an executive at an established company, or a budding founder of a promising startup, forgetting what innovation is and getting it wrong as a consequence could be the difference between a good quarter and a financial disaster. Let’s remind ourselves what real innovation actually is.
If you peep into a dictionary (which is fine, no one will judge you!), you’ll see that innovation is defined as the act of creating something new. It may be a new product, a new way of doing certain things and so on. Most people would stop there and forget about the most important part of the innovation process, one that distinguishes a good idea from a valuable idea. And that is the question is why? Why do we innovate? Do we innovate because everyone else in the market claims to be doing it, like teenagers in high school doing the thing because they think everyone is doing it?
If you think really hard about it, that’s what most companies are doing now. And we have a term for this type of innovation: innovation theatre. It is useless show and tell innovation, the kind that is designed to wow and nothing more. It is the kind of bland innovation that consumes valuable time, resources and talent without producing even a hint of value to customers, but done instead for the sake of good PR and perhaps boosting stock prices. ‘Real’ innovation must always be aligned with the goal of bringing value to your company’s key foundation: your customers. That is to say, innovation must solve painful customer problems, and produce outcomes that customers would value.
Sounds easy enough, but believe me when I say, it is much easier to look like you’re doing innovation (we’re doing AI!) than to prove that your innovation is having an impact on your customer satisfaction. Innovation is hard. Innovation accounting is even harder. That’s why services are popping up all over the world that help companies guide themselves towards utilizing innovative thinking correctly and methodically, using a number of battle hardened techniques perfected at actually innovative corporations like Google and Toyota.
Innovation peer dot com is one such service, created by our team of experts to bring actual innovation to your business. In one week, you’ll be on your way to practicing innovation theatre and designing new products and services with design sprints, creating sustainable enterprises with business model innovation, and accelerating growth with ethical growth hacking techniques that bring actual value to your customers. All services are offered remotely in order to protect you and your team during the COVID-19 pandemic. Check us out here to begin innovating with us today!
