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 work systematically with innovation and anchoring in the organization.
As a leader of innovation tasks, you must possess specific professional and managerial qualifications. At the same time, you must work systematically with innovation and anchoring in the organization. It is our experience that many focus solely on the innovation process itself and thereby overlook organizational factors that are 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 encountered 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 vision 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 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 logic because no one has yet found the golden solution to global 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 happened, and now you must develop ideas for the big gold medal. You must find the golden solution, right? We are often a little too eager to start with the idea development phase of an innovation project. But before you go too far, take a step back, delve into the problem you’re trying to solve, and make sure you’re tackling the relevant issue. It is asking the right questions for the challenge and challenging the assumptions. Both you and your colleagues have built around the challenge; do not be surprised if it turns out this is the utterly wrong problem you have started solving.
Decide How You Work with Innovation in Your Organization
When innovation 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 Chaos and Put Innovation in the Formula
It takes a lot of achievement to manage and lead innovative initiatives. However, there are several ways to standardize your work to build momentum and achieve concrete outcomes. You can control and direct your work with innovation with the same success as other initiatives in your business if you have the necessary information, tools, and mentality.
Get Tools, Knowledge, and Systematics – Become a Certified Innovation Leader
With an education in innovation management, you get access to a toolbox that equips you to make significant, strategic choices about working with innovation and create the proper framework and direction for your innovation projects – something that ultimately has a positive effect on the bottom line.
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