After indicating the various mistakes that should be avoided while implementing innovation in industrial contexts, it appears essential to nominate the steps that ought to be followed for a successful introduction. Innovation is a big idea with a big potential, but is it recommended to approach it with small steps preparing carefully the initial ground and trying to implement the relevant novel concepts without any rush and build the rest of the process from there. For the majority of firms, the first phases are the most critical on this long value-creating journey. At the end, the success of innovation relies above all on how your build “the innovation culture”
within your organization to support and sustain the development of your ideas. Obviously, the first step in creating the maintained culture for innovation is to lay the groundwork toward constructing the organizational ability for innovation. In other terms, the climate of innovation can only blossom when every single segment of the company endorses creativity, open visions along with the commitment and acceptance of the required and expected transformations. Therefore, when introducing innovation, the company has to take into account some essential aspects including the initial groundwork, the people and the process of innovation itself.
Concerning the initial groundwork, the company has to first of all spread the word about the intent to innovate and create by developing innovation mantras. This shows everyone that the company is walking on the journey of innovation. As we have previously mentioned, the start has to be managed carefully and slowly. The company must build and reinforce the concept of innovation stone by stone while highlighting the need for accountability. More importantly, the company has to know exactly how to respond to the internal resistance manifestations against innovative initiatives. Indeed, when the personnel and professional teams feel insecure, whether this feeling of insecurity is justified or not, they tend more often to assassinate the efforts towards creativity. No matter what the form of resistance is, whether it is an open disapproval or undercover objection, it remains a threat to innovation implementation. A lot of companies make the enormous mistake of dismissing these resistance forms while they are supposed to acknowledge its existence firstly and comprehend why it exists secondly and then find out how to fight it. It appears therefore that the best way to achieve so is by accepting and encouraging disruption and risk. This might sound illogical, but the optimal approach to deal with risk is by pushing people to stop being afraid of it. In other quarters, risk as a failure should be seen and experienced as a learning experience and not a danger that should be avoided at all costs. Only then, resistance towards innovation could be managed properly.
While introducing innovation, another aspect to be taken into account is the people. Indeed, a central element in implementing innovation is finding and keeping the right people and knowing how to deal exactly with people-related problems. Going in the past, the organization’s culture would shape the workers and their behaviors. Oppositely, today, it is the value system of the employees that all together determine and define the organization’s culture and style. The workplace has also become quite complicated today and companies
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have to figure out how to handle the changes resulting from the introduction of technology in their structures. They must be careful in the treatment and care of employees to develop a unified culture of innovation thinking about co-working spaces, new desk layouts and floor plans. The companies ought to ensure that their personnel are committed, engaged and ready to accept and contribute eventually to innovation. Barry Salzberg, global CEO of Deloitte expresses in a company statement on this matter: “Real opportunity exists for organizations to step up and create the conditions and commitment needed to encourage innovation in their work environments…if we get this right, we can better retain talent, remain more competitive into the future, and more positively impact society.”.
Furthermore, the process of innovation itself is an element to be looked at with infinite consideration. Indeed, companies have come to the conclusion nowadays that what they are innovating is important but how they are innovating is even more crucial. While working on developing new products or services, the responsible teams must make sure that they have the right mix of required ingredients for the implementation process that will make eventually the overall marketability occur faster and will upgrade productivity across the board. These key ingredients include mainly; generating ideas, screening, testing, analysis, beta tests, product development technicalities, commercialization and post launch review. Naturally, in order to acquire favorable innovation results, a structured and repeatable process is primary from the beginning to the end. (Brands, 2015).
After taking into consideration all the necessary elements in the innovation implementation and introduction processes, and if the company truly intends to be successful in the long run, it needs to establish an innovation management system so nothing is left to chance. When discussing innovation, we usually talk about terms such as creativity, open visions, new perspectives, freedom of ideas’ expression; still innovation needs also concepts that involve planning, calculation, scheduling and future visualization. This is where innovation management concept interferes shaping the structures and framework conditions so that innovation potentials can be automatically detected, ideas produced and then successfully executed. If the relevant company decides to establish an innovation management system, the following steps are recommended:
Mission of management and objectives: the success of innovation management depends above all on the management engagement of the firm’s management. This commitment cannot occur without a clear authorization from the top management in which the objectives, purpose and expectations of innovation management are defined.
The budgets, responsibilities and framework conditions are also to be determined.
Strategic orientation of innovation tasks: Based on the company’s management to work on innovation management system, it has to construct following that some eligible and well defined rules and guidelines that would be capable of defining the innovation vision that the company chooses to adopt.
Definition of the search domains: The relevant company must define the search fields where it chooses to innovate. These domains are described as strategic subject areas that are identified on the basis of strategic tools including trend, technology and market analyses.
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The beginning of brainstorming: the search of ideas from the most diverse sources and with the most innovative approaches would be searched to be eventually developed within the search domains.
The design of the innovation process: the process of innovation is the heart of the innovation management. It defines the management of the relevant idea from its first creation going through its successful market launching till its release to the operative management teams. (Eschberger, 2018).
These defined steps constitute more or less the start of the innovation management.
Innovation management is a continuous process that concentrates on several segments including corporate trends, innovation strategies, brainstorming and scouting, innovation portofolio, innovation process, innovation culture and supporting processes such as open innovation and intellectual property. The company would seek continuously to develop and optimize these aspects building up them into innovation management so as to upgrade the innovation capacity and innovation performance.
Within these first steps of innovation management introduction, it is normal for the company to expect challenges, and if major mistakes are made or essential decisions are dismissed, the company must expect some significant issues through the process. This is why the firm has to take into account some key success factors that could fit in multiple cases.
Management commitment to innovation: is one of the most essential success factors of innovation management. The commitment and constant engagement of all managers from top to bottom is the foundation of innovation process since it ensures and secures the support and the means to achieve innovations at all areas. Resources, time, support and budgets are the fuels for innovation success, without them we cannot talk about innovation and we can definitely not achieve the desired goals. For these elements to be provided, the company must demonstrate its full commitment to innovation otherwise innovation founders and leaders would be only wasting their time.
Strategic orientation: is vital to acquire a specific knowledge on the goals, path and the general orientation of the company. In case the strategic orientation is absent, it would be more difficult for those in charge of innovation to assess what and where to look at and to choose what kind of innovation topics should be on their top priority making it eventually more complicated for them to take the right decisions. This signifies that the strategic orientation must be defined carefully on the basis of future trends, opportunities, risks and challenges as well as the corporate strategy. What is purpose of innovation and what do we want to achieve in the future? What is the contribution of innovation to corporate strategy? What are the future topics and the search domains? Answering these question will allow to establish the strategy of innovation and its vision and the base for the entire development process.
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Clear responsibilities: the innovation process is a huge process that involves a wide variety of disciplines and functional areas and a large number of employees in order to ultimately implement successfully the relevant novel product or service. In other terms, in order for the company to have a successful innovation introduction, all employees must be aware of their exact responsibilities and roles within the innovation process to know how they are supposed to contribute to these changes and what is expected of them at different stages of the process in question.
Innovation culture: companies must comprehend once for all that innovation management is completely distinct from operative management or work. In fact, operational business is based on routine and efficiency while innovation is all about creativity demanding various values and attitudes including being open to making new steps, taking risks, thinking differently, admitting mistakes etc. Consequently, corporations must work on developing a positive innovation culture where everyone is encouraged to innovate and contribute to the innovation process. Innovation culture is therefore promoted through different levels: raising employee awareness about innovation, motivating workers and empowering them via training sessions or other, actively involving them and creating sustainable spaces and structures for their innovative tasks.
Change management: it is expected that introducing and implementing innovation within the organization will result into significant changes. These transformations would only be efficient and positive if they are supported by everyone involved and by all employees. It is therefore easy to conclude that change management is vital and must be taken into account by any innovation manager.
Integration of all employees: the central success factor of innovation introduction and implementation is definitely the “human being”. It would be accurate to say that without the full engagement and commitment of all employees, the innovation introduction and implementation are doomed to failure. Moreover, innovation isn’t a concept that would succeed within a restricted circle or group of workers. In other words, innovation requires the active support and initiation by everyone working in the company; all employees must be involved. Their involvement must include awareness-raising measures to inspire and motivate all workers for innovation, as well as structural measures for active engagement like pitching contest for instance, innovation competitions or classic idea management. The point of these initiatives is to make innovation an accepted and supported concept by all workers from bottom to top.
Collaboration: as mentioned before the involvement of all employees is vital but isn’t enough. Collaboration and corporation is another key success factor in innovation projects. Naturally, innovation combines between teams from various departments and
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disciplines. Still, it remains crucial that everyone keeps in mind a unified greater goal.
Otherwise, distinct demands can lead to a lack of cooperation and support or issues at the interfaces which would eventually result in slowing down the innovation process or even its failure if the imposed problems aren’t fixed rapidly and properly. This is why the company must work extremely hard to be aware all of its employees to gather their efforts and energies in pursuing a single objective whether it is related to the innovation visions or during their individual projects. (Eschberger, 2018).
Communication: Clear and consistent innovation is the key to the success of innovation implementation. In order to achieve so, the company must put in place a large number of solid communication channels going across the entire organization and plan accordingly an eligible communication strategy that defines the company’s innovation orientation and overall vision. Moreover, many companies have a mismatch between the internal and external communications making the employees feel confused and sometimes insecure as the internal messages transmitted within the company are different from the ones sent to the public. For this reason, the company ought to make sure that there’s a consistency between the two communications.
Communication and workers are two elements that must always go hand in hand. For the communication channels to work best, the employees must continuously and accurately be informed of the firm’s decisions, strategies, goals, opportunities, milestones, failures and future expectations. (Brands, 2016).
Information access: Everyone involved in the innovation projects must have access to all of the information needed to help make the necessary decisions about the allocation of human and financial resources. The offered information must determine if the novel introduced concepts are sufficient to meet the desired objectives and if they are meeting the imposed expectations. Having the open access to the relevant information will allow the workers to remain involved and updated on the progression of the projects in question and know exactly when and how to interfere. Also, this will enable them to draw effective and continuous learning experiences for a better implementation.
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