Monday Morning Mojo

Ensuring Your Innovation Efforts Succeed

Innovation is about success. It is not innovation if you come up with something new, pour in your effort and are only marginally better off than when you started, you have not achieved innovation.

Innovation is the successful introduction of a market offering that benefits everybody involved, both you and your customers. Innovation happens when a new product or service creates a return in the market that far exceeds the time and money it takes to develop and execute. When your offering is accepted and embraced, generating the resources that make it possible to support and grow its place in the market – that is innovation. That’s a positive inflection point. That is what you must aim for.

From my work on numerous innovation initiatives have distilled seven key activities that produce results-driven innovation. These activities are what make the difference between leaders who are haphazardly shoot in the dark with good ideas and those who consistently and systematically uncover potential, capitalize on opportunity, and generate traction that drives success in the marketplace. The seven activities are:

1.Pursuing and Leveraging Inflection Points
An inflection point is a game changer that has the power to propel you forward. Expert innovators are able to sense the potential in inflection points before they take place, and then ride these dramatic shifts toward four strategic targets: growing your base, increasing the offerings your customers buy, generating loyalty, and moving you up-market.

2. Building Innovation Capacity
Systematic innovation relies on the ability to contain the inherent stresses of a successful innovation environment. Strong innovation leaders recognize this and intentionally cultivate the people and the environment that provide a strong foundation.

3. Collecting Intelligence
The best innovation rises from a sea of information about products, services, customers, competitors, market conditions and internal capabilities. Business intelligence is the data that supports your ability to make strategic decisions. It could be information about products, customers, competitors, the market or internal capabilities—or all of the above. Effective innovation requires intelligence to make smart choices that take into account each of these areas.

4. Shifting Perspective
In order to see new opportunity you must be able to get out of your own box. Successful innovators question their own assumptions and try on alternative and helpful points of view.

5. Exploiting Disruption
Successful leaders learn to identify the opportunity embedded in adverse conditions. It can come from anywhere. If ignored or mismanaged, it throws business into disarray. But what if you could take the forces behind these intrusions and turn them to your advantage? That’s what the masters do. Instead of being waylaid by adverse conditions, they use them to get the upper hand. You can and you must become an expert in exploiting disruptions. Don’t fight change but use it to your advantage.

6. Generating Value
Value has been at the basis of commerce since the beginning when we first went beyond producing goods for our own use and began to use them for trade. Value is what we want, what compels us to pay or barter. Value is what drives all the activity tallied daily in the world’s markets. Value is the holy grail of business – you must keep your eye on it 24/7.

7. Driving Uptake
Every stage of the innovation process holds opportunity to engage the community of people who will be most interested in your offerings. Innovation leaders intentionally drive this uptake, or market acceptance, for maximum effect.

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March 2013 my next book, Getting Innovation Right: How Leaders Create Inflection Points that Drive Success in the Marketplace, will be released.

If you book conferences, contact me for a special deal in 2013 - I will be offering over copies of the book for your audience. All arrangements to take place through my representative, Tom Neilssen, at BrightSightGroup.com.

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