Harnessing Innovation: How to Turn Ideas into Business Reality
By: Shannon Lucas
Innovate. It’s a word that is thrown around quite often in today’s business world. It’s a term people use to describe what organizations need to do to stay relevant. And, it’s true value is often clouded by the flurry of new products with the word “innovative” attached; but, no matter how we look at it, innovation needs to be a part of today’s business objectives.
As an innovation leader at Vodafone, I define innovation as business transformation. While everyone approaches the concept differently, at the end of the day, it all comes down to how you can find new ideas and ways to truly transform your business. However, the increasingly important question for many organizations today is, “How?”
Turning Innovative Thinking Inside Out
Innovation programs are becoming the lifeblood of organizations large and small – but they cannot be achieved in silos. To truly inspire innovative ideas, organizations are realizing that they must create a collaborative culture, and tear down silos between departments and across industries. We’re already seeing this new focus on collaboration in the transformation of organizational structures, and even work spaces. For example, companies are now looking at collaboration tools beyond email to help streamline project management, and are designing office spaces to be more open with less traditional offices and conference rooms, in an effort to drive open communication among employees.
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All types of companies are realizing the value of a collaborative culture, embracing an entrepreneurial or “intrapreneurial” – acting like an entrepreneur while inside a larger company – spirit within their organizations to foster new ideas. To encourage innovation, companies are searching for ways to empower their employees to think outside the box and go beyond their traditional job descriptions. In fact, a recent study found that 93 percent of U.S. workers feel they “possess some entrepreneurial qualities.”[i] That is a drive that employers can leverage.
These are all positive steps toward an innovation-focused business approach, but today’s complex business challenges can’t be tackled alone. They require a new approach, one that involves working together as a global ecosystem to overcome some of the biggest challenges and take advantage of emerging opportunities.
While organizations need to tap their employees’ innovative thinking, the truly groundbreaking companies are the ones that look to other industry leaders and partners for collaborative solutions. I like to call this concept “co-creation”. Through co-creation, businesses have a powerful opportunity to affect positive change, tap into new revenue streams and develop innovative new products and services. However, this is often easier said than done.
It Starts with a Workshop
The beginning of a co-creation journey starts with a conversation – an innovation workshop. As the leader of an innovation team at Vodafone that has ran more than 100 innovation workshops in the past year with business customers around the world, I have seen how simple conversations can breed innovation. In our program, each workshop is specifically designed to nurture opportunities for organizations to collaborate on mobile and communications technology to enable new business models, enter new markets, and streamline operations. However, this methodology can be applied across the board. While the industry may call this process many things – design-thinking, brainstorming, ideation, and more – how does it actually happen?
