Customer and market research, competitive benchmarking, and focusing on market share could be detrimental to your organization's future performance. These approaches are critical improvement tools. Top performing organizations have turned them into a disciplined and useful science. But they can also lead to "me-too" followership or - even worse - commodity products and services that compete only on price.
Innovation and organizational learning are inextricably connected. A company must learn from its mistakes and cultivate multiple pathways for recognizing and leveraging the best ideas effectively, whether those ideas come from inside or outside of the organization, says Jim Clemmer. Here are 35 ways to sharpen your organizational "innovation radar," to accelerate learning cycles and recognize and capitalize on opportunities faster.
Most companies don't think through the trade-off between utilizing an external innovation as is versus customizing it nearly enough. As a result, they tend to suffer in time to market.
Is the world turbulent and hard to predict or changing in discernible ways? Two prominent strategists have different views, but draw similar lessons for business leaders.
Over the past year or so there have been more and more lists available online on how to "do innovation." Since the world is becoming extremely sound-bite driven and people are trying to perform multiple jobs simultaneously, this is probably the inevitable result. If you are charged with, or interested in approaches to delivering new value to the market, you may want to consider these following thoughts.
The missing ingredient of innovation may lie in the human ability (or lack thereof) to see the world from someone else's perspective and take action on the insights that this ability can reveal.
It may seem that tweaking existing offerings may be the safer or more provable approach, but the world may be changing too quickly or in very broad ways, ways in which an incremental approach may be insufficient for long term growth.
