Working with innovation can seem chaotic, confusing, and unmanageable. In addition, as a leader in innovation projects, you must have professional and management credentials. At the same time, you must be able to work systematically with innovation and anchoring in the organization.
Innovation is not accessible as people think. One of the most important things is that the people, not you, should love your innovative idea. When you get a creative idea, people start seeing the picture from their side perspective, but the reality is different. People often forget to get the idea of people’s likeness first and understand in what area that idea will grow or know people like that innovation rather or not.
As a leader of innovation tasks, you must possess a certain amount of both professional and decision-making qualifications. At the same time, you must be able to work systematically with innovation and anchoring in the organization. Our experience is that many focus solely on the innovation process itself and thereby overlook organizational factors crucial to the quality and sustainability of your innovation work.
Get rid of the idea of the “perfect idea”
When was the last time you shared the perfect idea coming dumping from the sky and giving you the answers to all your challenges? It occurs and is preserved, but something is amiss when 80% of all ideas fail or disappoint after being put to the market. Your idea may be ingenious, but if you do not work hard to make it relevant and valuable, it will not help. Therefore: test your idea early in the process, build prototypes, involve your target audience, and get feedback. And be prepared to let go of your heart, the child, if your target audience isn’t as enamored with it as you are.
Refine the challenge and set your creativity free
Yes, it sounds contradictory, but creativity thrives well with limitations. There is a reason why no one has yet found the golden solution to global problems such as hunger, water scarcity, and climate change. Instead of losing your breath and getting stuck, break the problem down and start providing clean water to a small village in Ghana instead of trying to save the world in one fell swoop. That way, you give your creativity the best terms.
Find out if you are solving the right problem
A challenge has been found, and you need to develop ideas for the big gold medal. You must find the golden solution, right? We are often too eager to start an innovation project’s idea development phase. But before you go too far, take a step back, delve into the problem you’re trying to solve, and ensure you’re tackling the relevant issue. It is about asking the right questions for the challenge and challenging the assumptions you and your colleagues have built around it. Do not be surprised if it turns out that this is the utterly wrong problem you have started solving.
Choose how you work with modernization in your organization
When modernization is often “degraded” to be chaotic and unmanageable, it is because you as a company or organization have not made active and explicit choices about how you want to work with innovation. If innovation is to be something more than just random and difficult-to-manage development projects in your organization, you and your colleagues must make many strategic choices, for example.
- Why do we want to work with innovation, and what should come from it?
- How much do we want to work on innovation?
- How will we work with innovation?
- Should we train people for it?
- Should we bring in knowledge from outside?
- How do we handle IPR?
Remove destruction and put innovation on the formula
You can manage and lead your work with innovation with the same success as other initiatives in your business if you have the necessary information, tools, and mentality. It takes a lot of struggle to manage and lead innovative initiatives. However, there are several ways to standardize your work so that you may build momentum and achieve concrete outcomes.