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Why is Innovation Essential to your business growth

Posted on December 26, 2021
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Irrespective of the event you are attending, you must have heard this word “Innovation” a million times.

Every organization aspires to be at the forefront and Innovate consistently.

Here is why Innovation is critical within yourself and towards your diverse teams you lead.

No body wants to stay behind let it companies or Individuals, we always aspire towards the next level and the only way to move ahead is by Consistently Innovating.

Top 50 Innovative companies in the world from BCG

Some of the companies mentioned are part of the list consistently like Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Cisco :), Microsoft and few others

Most Innovative Companies 2021 – Understanding Innovation | BCG

While organization hold innovation as their key strategy. As a manager it is important to build a positive attitude towards Innovation and drive it within the teams

if you as their manager take innovation seriously definitely your team will do too.

Firstly, what does Innovation mean?

According to Wikipedia – Innovation is production or adoption, assimilation, and exploitation of a value-added novelty in economic and social spheres; renewal and enlargement of products, services, and markets; development of new methods of production; and the establishment of new management systems. It is both a process and an outcome.

In simple words “an action or idea transformed to reality”

When I thought about writing this topic. I asked myself what information or value am I going to share about Innovation today

So I will share some of my experience around this topic

We never like to do the same monotonous or the repeated tasks again and again.

For example: it could be a simple excel work where you must follow 10 different steps to get the output.

I always hated to do the redundant processes and trying to find ways to automate them. Coming from a non technical background it is not easy to automate processes by yourself.

So identify the repetitions and the redundant processes, involve your technical teams to automate them.

Every fortune 500 companies will have their own technology teams to help projects or operations.

This is where leveraging and building a good relationship with your internal teams will play a vital role.

With similar attitude towards process improvements and receiving positive feedback from Program managers motivated me to change not just some simple processes but share ideas to improve the overall business and build software’s tools which can value to the overall business.

Well, all you need is an interest to do something new, rest will follow – invest time to learn and improvize.

As a manager, you must also build this mindset with your teams which is an important task.

If you keep on telling your team we must innovate and build projects, you will stay where you are and will keep talking about it for the next several years without any progress.

Take actions by creating projects and involve your teams. You will see bunch of new ideas from your team members when they know how to create and build projects.

You must show how it values your entire projects and the recognition it can bring.

Here is an article about how should companies overcome the innovation readiness gap – Most Innovative Companies 2021 – Understanding Innovation | BCG

Suggestions on how to build innovation within your teams

  1. Innovation starts with yourself and your People
  2. Building a culture within your teams to report the challenges they face while working irrespective of how big or small the problem is – this is utmost important to start with
  3. Ensure that the issues or challenges they report are tracked, documented, reported and resolved.
    • Share the suggestions to your senior management provided by your team this builds your teams confidence.
    • Do keep them appraised on the status
  4. Motivate and build your teams mindset
    • without clear understanding of goals and mindset nothing can change, so open up yourself and then get your teams buy-in.
    • Take them out for a coffee and share your plans, areas you want to improve and ask for suggestions.
  5. Stay connected with your internal Technical Solutions teams as they hold the tools or resources you need to build the idea you have in mind
  6. Consistent Process Improvement
  7. Spend time to analyze and understand the pain points from your customer
    • No one else can explain the challenges much better than your customer (read all the customer surveys you get – good or bad – you will get so many ideas from them every time you read it)
  8. Consistently revisit your processes
    • Connect : Your team members are the one who work on the processes daily, so they will know what is good and bad in the process.
    • Don’t judge them, understand the challenges they have while they work on these processes – you will gets tons of improvement ideas during these discussions (its important to build that comfortableness within your teams to get to this level) – don’t just go once a year and expect them to open up
  9. Identify the monotonous work you and your team do. Analyze and build a list of potential solutions you can offer.
  10. Delegate the work but ensure to be part of this as the information you hold is critical for the idea to convert into innovation.
    • Your inputs as manager will add lot of value especially if you know the business well. Don’t expect just by delegating this to one of your SME, Team leader or Managers you can achieve innovation within your teams
  11. Focused Value
  12. Identify the value by improvising or innovating the activity
  13. Showcase your teams why must you do it and the benefits you and your team will achieve through this innovation (its important to get their buy-in to support you)
  14. Win as a team, lose as a team

According to BCG analysis reveals that focusing on deficits in five of the ten i2i readiness areas are likely to have the greatest returns: Most Innovative Companies 2021 – Understanding Innovation | BCG

Interesting articles relating to Innovation:

For SME’s/team leaders who are aspiring to become a PMP or an existing manager facing hurdles, my personal recommendation is to study for PMP Certification this course provides you the foundation on

  • People – soft skills required to run the projects smoothly
  • Process – technical aspects
  • Business environment – connection between projects and organizational strategy

personally, this course helped me to improve my operations and my understanding towards the above foundations better.

Conclusion

Innovation is all about converting your ideas into reality. As a manager or a leader for your team, must share the purpose of your project and your existence. This way your team will help your business evolve and more importantly build the value your customers expect

Whatever product or tool you build it will become cliché over a period of time, In order to solve that you must consistently improvize or innovate that product by replacing with a better one.

How did you build innovation within your team? please share your thoughts below