What is innovation?
Innovation is not the revolution; innovation is a constant improvement of the existing products or services. The competitors might offer them, but you are able to innovate them to offer a competitive advantage to your clients and customers. Innovation was a major advantage for the Japanese corporations, when they started to copy the American products, but they provided them with innovative ideas, which were found useful by the customers.
Innovation is about taking the risk of finding new way of doing things. Innovation requires risk and it requires the risk acceptance from the managers and employees. There are successful innovations, but most of the innovations just fail, as they are not a significant move forward.
Innovation is not the same process as invention. The invention is about bringing a completely new product and the invention process differs dramatically from the innovation process. When people innovate, they use the existing product and they try to find ways how to improve some of the aspect. They can bring a new idea about the production or they can bring a new feature. But it is still the product, which works the same way as the previous one. The invention is about bringing a completely new product, which can be placed on the market or they invent a new internal process, which gives a competitive advantage to the organization.
When people in the business innovate, they work with the feedback and the external market benchmarks, as they want to improve the products or services, as they are better than the services provided by the competitor. The feedback is extremely important as it represents the voice of the customer in the innovation process.
Many organizations have specific methodologies to bring innovations, but most innovations are born just by the employee’s creativity and they were not asked to design. People love to innovate, because they play. They can use their brain to bring the best, they can. They bring their hearts to the company, when they innovate in the name of the organization.
What can innovation bring?
Innovation can result in several useful innovation outcomes, which can be utilized by the organization:
- Updated product with the new features
- New way of the production, which leads to decreased costs
- New usage of the current product
- Updated process or the procedure, which speeds the process and makes the organization speeder than its competitors
These are just several examples of the useful innovation outcomes. The organization has to support the employees in the innovation effort.
