Innovation

As you can see from Peter Druckers definition innovation is about creating wealth or values for an organization that produce a competitive advantage. Innovation can be seen as a spectrum that operates between two different ranges. The first is a narrow range. A narrow range would focus on a single product and its development. The second is a broad range. A broader range focuses on creating business value throughout an organisation. 

Who Benefits From Innovation?

There are four key stakeholders who benefit from innovation. These are the owner/shareholder, the organisation, the employees, and the customers. 

Owner/Shareholder: Innovation increases the value of the organisation, leading to an increase in their own wealth.

Organisation: Successful innovation will lead to happier, more loyal customers with a better focus on them. Innovation also leads to an increase in the usage of an organisation's products and services, as well as an increase in revenue, profits and market share.

Employees: Innovation creates an interesting place to work, and opportunities to grow your career ( up-skilling and/or re-skilling) and receive recognition. All key components to retaining, attracting and having a well motivated and focused team.

Customers: Innovation results in better products and/or services that better meets the needs of the customer and hopefully exceeding their expectations.

This leads to potential organisation change depending on the need to design new business processes for the innovation. You would then need to consider what changes are needed to get the innovation to work. This could be anything from hiring more employees to up-skilling/re-skilling current employees and providing additional training. Lastly, society means determining how the innovation will impact your customes/market - Will they want it? What general good would this do?

Although this model appears to be sequential, like a sort of 'waterfall' project management style, it is actually much more complicated than that. The path to innovation is an iterative process, where changing one element can influence what you end up delivering at the end. An idea of this iterative process is given in the image below:

What was hinted at throughout this blog was the need to have data and to make decisions driven by data. While the data may not always be complete, and very rarely perfect, it offers the best approach for success. It's in the generation and integration of data where GeoDirectory operates, with both supplying and turning raw data into information. Take a look at  the kind of information we produce on the residential and commercial property markets. You never know, you may find a new opportunity in the reports. Links to these blogs are at the end.

Conclusion

To summarise the blog, we discussed how innovation can be narrow and product focused, or wide and focused on creating value across the organisation for all stakeholders. We looked at how innovation occurs in four areas, with the most important and impactful area being Finance. We also explored the extent of how commercialisation is dependent on the business model and the three key areas in relation to this. The underlying assumption throughout is that each organisation’s core advantage or USP is essentially being eroded by competitors and/or market movements. With this being the case, the key message to take away from this blog is that unless you innovate you risk going out of business. To quote William Pollard, "Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow."

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