Is increasing the innovation capability good enough?

Companies spend a lot of money to increase the innovation capability of their staff, hoping thereby to get the competitive edge. Increasing the innovation capability of the organization is an important aspect, but it is not good enough for the company in terms of getting the competitive edge.

Having built the innovation capability, management needs to recognize the ideas which have higher potential to succeed and yield better returns among the other new ideas. Even recognizing is of not much use if the management cannot find ways to get these ideas implemented within a certain time and money.

Enlarging pipeline and creating aiming points a good innovation strategy

Enlarging the pipeline-by increasing the sheer volume of ideas-is only half the story. The simultaneous challenge is to enhance the pipeline by improving the quality of those ideas, not just the quantity.
Ideate around specific themes: Create ”aiming points” for innovation by focusing your ideation efforts on clearly defined corporate challenges, customer problems, or industry issues.
Appreciate comments and other ideas.

Limits of incrementalism

The hard reality is that “incrementalism” will no longer grow revenues by coming up with a slightly improved version of the same old thing and then selling it to the same old customers through the same old channels in the same old way.
An issue faced by many companies that were considered stable in the past. In the present context, find themselves stuck with no new ideas or products to grow the business.

What drives innovation anyway ?

Is it passionate individuals or the drive from senior management leading to innovation or corporate strategy or is it the external environment.

In my experience on this subject I have had the privilege of listening and reading materials by innovation experts. There are various views- 1. There needs to be passion in what we do. 2. Need for senior management to drive innovation. 3. Innovation to be part of the corporate strategy. 4. Then there are combinations for E.g- we need passionate individuals and organization support. 5. If an innvation success drives more innovation. 6. Then there are people saying that even the innovators kind of relax if there are no challenges from the external environment. Following this line the same say that when the “survival of the fittest” condition starts to set-in, it becomes inevitable that there is a natural tendency to innovate which further leads to actually doing well to find ways to survive by innovating. However in the end, only the best manage to live through for the next cycle.

Why Companies struggle to be Innovative ?

Companies in their ambition to become innovative, mimic the approaches taken by the designated innovative companies. In my experience (last 10 years) following this approach to become innovative has seldom worked. Even in cases when the aspiring company wants to become innovative is in the same business as that of the designated innovative company.

We have seen from our studies that the challenges the companies face internally and externally are of varying types and degrees. Then there are specific challenges that need special attention at individual, working group and management levels. At an individual level the way people think are different. This is evident from the process of generation of ideas to prototyping and monetizing. There is definately no one approach, in fact there are not even a few approaches to make companies innovative. My experience and research has shown that there is need for clear understanding of the context to enable innovativeness.