If you're running or managing a business and
want it to be around for a long time, you need to spend a good part of
your time innovating. That's because, in a fast-moving world, where
people expect things to get better and better, and cheaper and cheaper,
innovation is your route to getting ahead of your competition.
Here are 7 ways to put new life blood into your organization through innovation.
1. Create An Innovative Climate. Goran
Ekvall of Lund University in Sweden has defined three conditions needed
for a climate of innovation. They are: trust, dynamism, and humour. One
of Ekvall's case studies was a Swedish newspaper where the team working
on the women's section consistently outperformed all the other teams.
The reason? Quite simply, this group trusted one another, had a high
level of energy and shared a common sense of humour.
2. Develop Washing-Up Creativity. According
to the Roffey Park Management Institute, most flashes of inspiration
come to people when they are away from work and not forcing their
conscious brains to find solutions to their problems. For some, ideas
come while mowing the lawn or taking the dog for a walk or playing golf
or waiting on a railway station. For Isaac Newton, it was an apple on
the head while sitting in the garden. For Archimedes, it was in the
bath. For others it's while doing the dishes; that's why Roffey Park
calls these flashes of insight: "washing-up creativity".
3. Make New Connections. Making
new connections between existing features of your product or service is
a popular way to innovate. Akio Morita, chairman of Sony, said that he
invented the Walkman because he wanted to listen to music while walking
between shots on his golf course. His team simply put together two
seemingly incompatible products: a tape recorder and a transistor radio.
4. Find Out What People Need. Necessity
is a great spur to innovation. Take, for example, writing paper. The
Chinese had already made paper from rags around the year 100 BC but
because there was no need for it, nothing came of it. When it did reach
Europe in the Middle Ages when writing was all the rage, the supply of
rags and worn-out fabric soon dried up. That's when a French naturalist
made the discovery that wasps made their nests by chewing wood into a
mash that dried in thin layers. Within 100 years, all paper was made
using the idea of wood pulp.
5. Test, Test, Test. Product testing is the way most
inventors and organizations go about innovation. It may not be the
quickest route to success, but it is often the surest. Jonas Salk, for
example, discovered the polio vaccine by spending most of his time
testing and testing and continually finding out what didn't work. Thomas
Edison, the inventor of the filament light bulb, recorded 1300
experiments that were complete failures. But he was able to keep going
because, as he said, he knew 1300 ways that it wasn't going to work.
6. Adopt and Adapt. One
relatively easy approach to innovation is to notice how others deal
with problems and then adapt their solutions to your own. It's known as
"adapt and adopt". It's what watchmakers Swatch did when they realized
that the more reliable their watches became, the less people needed to
replace them. Their solution? Borrow an idea from the world of fashion
and collections by turning their watches into desirable fashion
accessories. Now people buy Swatch watches not just to tell the time but
because it's cool to do so.
7. Take Lessons From Nature. If
you really want to be inventive, you can't beat nature. The world of
nature gives us an endless supply of prototypes to use in our own world.
Take Velcro, for example. Velcro was patented by Georges de Mestral in
1950 after he returned from a hunting trip covered in tiny burrs that
had attached themselves to his clothing by tiny overlapping hooks. De
Mestral quickly realized that here was an ideal technique to fasten
material together. A whole new way of doing things was suddenly
invented.
The history of the world is the history of innovation.
Thomas Kuhn called each acceptance of a new innovation a "paradigm
shift". For once a new innovation becomes accepted, the world has
changed for ever and can never go back to the way it was.
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