Innovation is one of the most over-used buzzwords in business today. It’s taken over from retired business buzz-words like disruption, game-changing, outside-the-box, cutting-edge and change agent and is often used by people who have very little knowledge about the subject yet refer to it often to fill space without meaningful intent.

The biggest difference between innovation and the other pre-mentioned buzzwords is the historical definition behind it; Innovation stands for a significant positive change, it’s about solving difficult problems and focusing on an outcome or result, it’s about creating quality across multiple areas of business at the same time. Innovation has given us assembly line, the internet, flat screen TVs, and mobile devices, it’s separated companies from their competitors and is one of the most sought after capabilities in today’s business landscape. But like any other result, innovation needs a plan behind it, it needs a strategy that guides its implementation and ensures its success.

Why Create an Innovation Strategy?

Creating an innovation strategy is nothing more than committing to a set of repeatable policies or behaviors aimed at giving you and your company a competitive advantage. Great strategies humanize their vision by clarifying objectives and priorities and promoting a sense of alignment with the different groups responsible for it. Your innovation strategy will speak to the goals of the business, the problems that need to be solved and the processes needed for different business functions to work together.

What is the Goal of an Innovation Strategy?

Development of an innovation strategy should start with a clear understanding and description of the objectives that will help create a competitive advantage for you and your company. When doing this, it’s important to avoid generalities like company value and growth; focus on specific areas where change will create your competitive advantage.

An innovation strategy should answer some of the most import questions within your company, such as:

• How will we increase our value with existing customers?
• How will we attract new customers to our products and services?
• How will we increase the intrinsic value of the company?
• How will we evolve our products and services?
• How will we make it easier to get our products and services to our customers quicker and more efficiently?

In addition to this, it’s important that your innovation strategy has metric expectations behind it, by speaking to the following issues:

• What is the return on investment from innovation?
• What are the key performance indicators we’re looking to achieve?
• What resources are required to create value and change?
• What are the processes required to create and evaluate the success and failure of change?

It’s important to understand that the innovation strategy of one company most likely won’t work for another. Companies like Apple, Tesla, Corning, and Boeing have an innovation strategy that is core to its long-term business strategy but trying to copy or imitate their ways of innovating will probably fail within another company. Every company is different, as is every team, product and service. It’s important that your innovation strategy takes this into consideration. Learning from others is never bad, but trying to emulate their strategies may lead to negative results.

Conclusion

While innovation is an overused business buzzword, it is necessary to add to the value of an existing business. Today most companies are looking to innovate their consumer experience and add value in new and exciting ways. The creation of an innovation strategy will help guide long term change within your organization and allow you to make the right business decisions with regards to innovation.

There’s a misunderstanding in the way many organizations embrace a fail-fast to succeed-sooner culture. All too often it’s used to justify speedy, under-informed decision making, just good-enough deliverables and products, and missed performance expectations; when in fact the true purpose of a fail-fast to succeed-sooner culture is to foster innovation by giving investment to ideas that may push the bar further while reducing their inherent risk.

Innovation is important

The idea of the fail-fast to succeed-sooner culture came from the startup world at a time when innovation was driving dramatic change in the way people received information, interacted with products and services and communicated with one another. Today the pace of innovation hasn’t changed; most organizations are going through some form of disruption to the status quo, but companies need to embrace the right fail-fast to succeed-sooner culture to ensure that they are not allowing the mantra to be a justification for mediocrity.

Failure is Important

Failure is an important part of the innovation process, though many people fear failure as the pressure to succeed is so intense. In many cases it drives people to create shortcuts to prove success and an illusion of viability rather than focusing on the metrics that truly drive business results forward.

Embracing the right fail-first to succeed-sooner culture requires that the teams involved are working in an honest an open environment. It requires courage and support from management and patience in the face of adversity. Because of this it is very rare that companies truly create the right culture.

5 Factors to success

A true fail-fast to succeed-sooner culture embraces experimentation; learning from mistakes while capitalizing on successes, focusing on long term goals and performance gains.

This requires that:

1. Leadership is delivering a vision that all projects can be measured against
2. Projects should follow a well understood methodology that allows for measurement
3. No one project is so crucial to the long term vision that the entire success or failure of that vision rest solely on that one project
4. Teams are given the opportunity to evaluate and change projects on a regular basis
5. Both successes and failure are truly celebrated

Conclusion

The speed of innovation is not going to decrease and because of this failure is inevitable. Embracing a true fail-fast to succeed-sooner culture requires that teams work in an open and honest environment focusing on a long-term vision. It requires that teams adjust their expectations that mediocrity is an acceptable reason for failure and that the greatest successes come from experimentation with a purpose.