Why Innovation Is So Important In Business
Growth is the cornerstone of any successful business. Growth drives share price appreciation for public companies. Growth enhances the reputation of senior management. Growth demonstrates a firm’s ability to attack a market and keep competition at bay. Innovation is one of the key drivers of growth. Whether it is enhancing existing product features, finding new markets and customer segments, discovering new products or developing new services, the ability to innovate effectively defines a firm’s ability to grow.
The challenge has always been that innovation was somewhat of a mystery. For most firms, key breakthroughs came haphazardly. In the books The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution Clayton Christensen outlines a specific definition of innovation and a systematic approach to institutionalizing innovation within a company.
There are two overall types of innovation: sustaining innovation and disruptive innovation. Sustaining innovation targets existing high end customers with better performance than what was previously available before. It is the most common form of innovation and it is what established companies in a market are best structured to do.
Collaborating Online – An Enabler for Accelerated Innovation
It is amazing to read so many articles, press releases with regards to how businesses and organisations are only now starting to consider and accept online collaboration as an every day activity. The ability for a business and organisation to be able to do everything internally is long gone.
Clearly there are sectors and industries which are quicker to adopt and use online collaboration. As you may know, one of the key sectors that I work in is the Life Sciences, who typically were very conservative to accept new ways of working. However, the days of having a very rich pipeline of new products and existing products being sold very profitably have all but disappeared or in some cases has already gone.
There is the “patent cliff” where for some pharmaceutical companies this cliff is quickly approaching. When they go over the edge, they can loose as much as 50% of their sales revenues to the generics in the first 12 months. The increase in regulatory compliance, the move to personalised medicine and the enormous pressure on Pharmaceutical companies to reduce the cost of their products is creating a major problem with regards to growth, profits and share price. It is clear that the analysts will not stand another decade of huge investments per annum and no new products to show for it.
How Can Innovation Improve Your Life?
Remember how you worked a long time to learn to drive or ride a bike? The same thing is true with innovation. Innovation requires just as much hard work and time before it becomes a natural talent. The following information can help you learn to find and recognize your innovation.
Think for Yourself
Think for yourself instead of letting others tell you what to do. If you let others opinions influence you too much, you won’t hear your own inner thoughts. When you have a good idea, it is a waste of time to explain yourself to people who don’t get it. Some people are not going to get your idea and you don’t need negativity influencing you. If everyone let the opinions of others influence them, how many great inventions would we even have?