Managing Innovation -the Key To Business Success And Growth
21st century is seeing innovation at the core of business competency
. With aggressive competition and need to survive through the global economy, organizations need to be creative. Innovation which has been till date been considered only for new product development has become vital aspect for business growth.
The present scenario does not allow businesses to compete on the basis of price tags alone. With lower transportation costs and better communication, markets tend to move away from the developed to the developing countries. To stand fast against such challenges, organizations need to innovate.
Innovation today is about small incremental changes to products and services and needs to be linked to the strategy of business planning process. Ideas for innovation can come in from any business quarter and is not necessarily dependent on the R&D. Irrespective of the source of generation; ideas form a valuable source of information for future innovation products making idea management a necessity. Innovation for the organizations involved in product development, are based on ideas focused towards improvement of product and process rather than being completely innovative. For start-ups on the other hand managing innovation is the key to attain visibility, acquire clients and sustain business.
Most organizations have innovation hubs wherein all the creative thoughts and innovative ideas are collated and coordinated. Creative thoughts can stimulate ideas for innovation in business, product innovation, market or process. Personera the personalized product platform on Facebook for various brands took up a marketing innovation tactic through three steps:
* Hiring and promoting a website which gave them the required leads
* Launching the website with the help of a third party service which gave them unique visitors on the first day itself
* Acquiring users through Facebook feeds after product purchase- this made the website viral
On the other hand, Netflix a successful dot.com venture made use of innovative management solutions for long term success. What the organization adopted was creation of innovation culture by providing employees freedom rather than limitations. This enabled them to help employees bring out the creative and innovative ideas. Netflix with its idea management solutions could easily manage innovation and creativity among its self-disciplined and high-performance employees in an informal environment.
Today with innovation being vital for the success and growth of business, enterprises need to adopt an integrated approach to manage innovation rather than considering a piecemeal approach. Leading service providers have designed and developed innovation management software for the benefit of the new age global enterprises to collate coordinate and manage innovative ideas from offices spread world-wide.