How to Integrate Innovation into your Business Strategy

It is important to develop a culture which will foster innovation. A framework to support innovation includes integrating it into your business objectives by:

• taking a holistic approach to innovation
• establishing strong channels of communication
• fostering a culture of innovation.

Global surveys show that innovation occurs where leaders encourage and protect it and executives actively manage and drive innovation. Innovation is inhibited when business managers talk about it yet do nothing to promote it.

Here are tips on how to integrate innovation into your business;

Taking a holistic approach to innovation

Innovation also covers improvements to processes, organisational structure, business modelling and marketing.

When developing your innovation strategy, look to the overall organisation and to stakeholders, such as suppliers and clients. Look at your skills and the skills of your employees; can you develop more effective teams by combining their imaginative and logical thinking?

Establishing strong channels of communication

Your communication networks will determine your innovation effectiveness. Effective networks allow people with different kinds of knowledge and ways of tackling problems to cross-fertilise ideas. New ideas breed more new ideas, so networks can generate a cycle of innovation.

When developing your innovation strategy, think about how you can create conditions that allow innovation to become part of daily discussions.

Fostering a culture of innovation

A culture of innovation creates an environment in which employees are encouraged to take risks and test their ideas. It can be as simple as acknowledging employees’ ideas and encouraging them to pursue ideas that add value to the business. Think about how this can be achieved and built into your innovation strategy.

Innovation prototyping

These strategies can be implemented in large organisations with research and development departments; and small-medium business with little or no reserach capabilities. Developing a prototype is a great way to take an idea and cheaply develop a physical product which can be tested further and either accepted or discarded with minimal cost.

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Culled from: Business Queensland