With businesses ramping business back up after a trying couple of years, it can be difficult to find your feet in the industry again. Maybe old ideas and processes aren’t working anymore; maybe morale is low, or maybe things just feel a little stale. What your business is missing is innovation – and here’s what that means.
What is ‘Innovation’?
It is easy to get caught up in buzzwords and business-speak when it comes to conversations about your business – ‘blue-sky’ and ‘upskilling’ this isn’t. Innovation is an important concept, and crucial to your continued development as a company in a time of ever-changing technologies and tastes. Innovation at its simplest is an invention, or even re-invention; ideas which change the game and grow your company in the process. They can be big or they can be small, but without innovation, Amazon would still only be selling second-hand books. Innovation can be divided into three distinct classes, which we will talk about in turn below.
Process Innovation
This is the kind of innovation, which is most likely to chime with most businesses, and refers to the overhaul of internal systems that keep the company ticking – whether in your accounting or sales process, in manufacturing, shipping, or even training. For example, an energy provider such as British Gas would have to innovate the training and development of both new and existing engineering staff, in line with improvements made to the newest lines of combination boilers.
Industry Model Innovation
Business model innovation sounds less like innovation and more like transformation but is nonetheless deeply important to the success of many companies. When tastes change and a company’s niche is no longer profitable, intervention is needed to pre-empt that next step and transition back into a place of high demand.
For many companies, this innovation was more or less forced by the COVID-19 pandemic, where successive lockdowns required companies to adopt working from home or hybrid-working – making in-person customer interfacing impossible for the companies that usually relied on it.
Product Innovation
Your company may already have a design and development team, and you may think this is exactly what they are for – which is, to some extent, true. But real product innovation requires more than design and engineering expertise. Trends need to be forecast and needs discovered before they exist – or before a competitor finds them first. The iPhone is an excellent example of this, as touch screens had existed for years before the 12th generation launch – but hadn’t been leveraged correctly. The refinement of that touch screen to suit handheld technologies for the 95% pre-empted an industry shift and had other manufacturers catching up for years to come.
