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Rajesh is the CEO of a startup that provides tech support to retail outlets looking to shift their operations online. After a promising start, Rajesh enters a phase where his organization’s profits stagnate and the number of new collaborators begins to reduce.
An internal audit makes clear what Rajesh has known for a while—his organization has ceased to innovate. Without an understanding of how to develop new and innovative ideas, Rajesh’s confidence wavers and he even considers stepping down as CEO.
Eventually, Rajesh hires Komal, a young, ambitious manager with expertise in how to innovate in a sustained manner. Komal’s role in turning around Rajesh’s organizations underlines the indispensable role innovation plays in today’s organizations.
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What Is Innovation In Business?
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The Importance Of Innovation
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What Are Innovation Skills?
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Innovation Skills Examples
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Internalize Innovation
What Is Innovation In Business?
According to a study conducted by McKinsey Global Institute, almost half the jobs that professionals across the world perform currently have the potential to be automated by technology that already exists. In light of this information, it’s natural to ask the question: what makes humans irreplaceable in a professional system where machines can become omnipotent?
The answer is an innovation culture. But what is an innovation culture and how to build one?
While innovation in general means the ability to introduce new ideas and methods, the concept of an innovation culture and the answer to ‘what is innovation in business’ revolves around generating ideas that create value and upgrade processes.
What is innovation in entrepreneurship? It’s the ability to solve problems and advance knowledge by making use of the aforementioned ideas and processes. At its core, innovation is among the key employability skills in today’s world.
The Importance Of Innovation
Before proceeding to understand how to be innovative or analyzing creativity and innovation skills, it’s vital to assess why innovation matters:
- Asking ‘how to be innovative’ matters in competitive industries because it allows organizations to stay one step ahead by coming up with newer ideas and products that give them a competitive edge
- Creativity and innovation skills provide a distinct identity to an organization, allowing it to stand out from its competitors who may be more complacent or less willing to invest in game-changing innovations
- A good example of creativity and innovation is when a new step taken by an organization helps shift an entire industry’s practices, besides making a tangible impact in the life of consumers and clients
What Are Innovation Skills?
When it comes to sustained growth and execution excellence, innovation skills are your best bet. Innovation skills refer to the qualities that you can tap into to create and disrupt and make a difference to your organization and industry. The most essential innovation skills are explained below:
1. Creativity
In business, creativity is about understanding what needs consumers may have and how they can best be fulfilled in keeping with consumption trends and patterns. A creative professional is someone who can make abstract connections between seemingly unrelated aspects or ideas and use those connections to deliver novel products and processes.
2. Critical Thinking
Creativity and innovation skills rely mostly on critical thinking, the ability to analyze and evaluate objectively to reach concrete conclusions. Critical thinking requires an unwavering focus and a commitment to think deeply and widely about issues so as to come up with solutions.
3. Negotiation And Persuasion
Since innovation is about overturning the status quo, it’s inevitable that there will be resistance towards it, especially from those who’re content with how things work. A good innovator negotiates with stakeholders to show them the benefits of innovation besides creating a consensus of support through effective persuasion.
4. Coordination And Communication
Even if one person comes up with an innovative idea, it usually takes a team to put it into action. This means that proper coordination and transparent communication are key to providing a powerful example of creativity and innovation. Having an active feedback loop that accounts for the suggestions and opinions of others is also extremely useful in fine-tuning innovations, which are often just as crucial as the original blueprints themselves.
5. Leadership
What is innovation in entrepreneurship? Most of the time, it’s good leadership. From Steve Jobs to Elon Musk, from Indra Nooyi to Vandana Luthra, the most successful leaders are often the most consistent innovators and vice versa. Why so? Because leadership and innovation are joined at the hip by a common list of attributes—having a vision that can make change happen, determination and diligence and a mixture of idealism and pragmatism that’s necessary to take calculated risks.
Innovation Skills Examples
The following examples of innovation skills capture how organizations can transform their industries if they put innovation to good use:
- Nestlé, the world’s largest food and beverage organization, launched a global innovation accelerator called “InGenius” in 2014. Among the best modern innovation skills examples, this accelerator enabled Nestlé employees to collaborate in coming up with business solutions no matter their location or language of communication
- After several years of increasing irrelevance in the videogame market, Nintendo came back with a bang by thinking out of the box and innovating with Pokemon Go, which incorporates elements of virtual reality, gamification and commerce with unprecedented scale and precision
- Netflix changed the entire landscape of entertainment in two simple yet revolutionary steps. First, it reinvented the delivery of DVDs to overhaul movie rental services. Second, it introduced a streaming service that changed how audiences consume entertainment altogether
These were some examples that explain the concept.
Internalize Innovation
How do you make innovation a habit? How do you keep generating new ideas? At Harappa, we have all the answers through the Championing Innovation pathway, which equips you with sensing, reacting and adapting to disruption and fueling innovation in pipelines. With the help of lessons on inspiration and imagination, brainstorming and brainwriting from a world-class faculty, you’ll be able to unleash creativity, harness collaboration and champion ideas.
Sign up for the Championing Innovation pathway right away and take the all-important step towards internalizing innovation.
