Innovation is a strategy that sustains success. For the average company, roughly 35% of their offerings are less than five years old. Any organization needs to innovate to survive and move forward, no matter what category of business you may be in. Fortunately, innovation can occur at any level. A great idea is just as likely to spring from an entry-level worker as it is a manager.
Here is the importance of innovation in the workplace and why it should be a priority:
Innovation leads to success.
Not every innovation will result in a massive discovery or a new hit. However, any worthwhile innovation brings with it a certain level of success.
Teams uncover new ways to do things and better products or services. Business models adjust to be more efficient. All-around, this is a very good thing for the organizations that prioritize innovation in the workplace.
Innovation empowers your workforce.
Empowering your workforce is another importance of innovation in the workplace. You can’t be all places at once nor do you have the benefit of being able to see things from every perspective. You have team members all over the place. They might have ideas for innovation, suggestions on how to improve certain processes, and a way to get things done differently and more efficiently.
When you breed a culture of innovation, you empower your employees. They become more confident. They feel valued. They get proactive and start participating in your organization in a way they may not have otherwise done because now there’s an investment.
Being innovative saves on costs.
A huge aspect of innovation is somehow making things better and more efficient. Looking at workplace processes, infusing a culture of innovation and refining how you do things can save expenses in a big way.
You can move faster. You can be safer in doing things. Innovation can drastically help the bottom line, especially when we start discussing concepts such as tech and automation.
Innovation gives you a competitive advantage.
When you innovate in the workplace and you learn how to do something better, this is an advantage over competitors. For example, if you’re able to do something such as increase production by 10-15%, this is big news.
If it results in a new product that’s better than a competitor’s, this is also something you can take to market, penetrate quickly, and gain a boost.
You reinvent your image.
It’s rare that a single innovation does it but, over time, multiple innovations lead to a sort of rebranding for some companies. The image that you’re tied to today won’t be what you’re associated with tomorrow.
If you don’t innovate, for example, you will appear dated. If you do, naturally, things will change. You’ll be kept relevant in the market’s eyes and your workforce simultaneously will feel proud of the company they work for.
Design thinking is an innovation machine.
When you take a design thinking workshop, you learn a system by which innovation is not only fostered but also tested, developed into a prototype, and put in front of target users before a wide release.
Design thinking is the ultimate way to continually innovate at little risk to your organization and to ensure the innovative solutions you arrive at are tested and ready to be released.
You resolve critical user problems.
Look around where you are right now. You can probably identify at least one problem with the products around you. Things you’d like to fix. Things you’d like to change.
The users who are connected to your company are probably seeing the same things about what you’re selling. Innovation allows you to solve aspects of your output before a competitor does.
Innovation breeds innovation.
When organizations start to innovate and team members get on board and feel like they’re innovators as well, one innovation spurs onto the next one. You can redesign an organization, increase production, or increase capacity rather quickly, allowing you to take all these major benefits of innovation in the workplace and see them continue almost indefinitely.
Learn from failed innovations.
A company that stumbles upon an innovative idea and puts it into play without testing it may experience a failure. Some ideas don’t work. If you rarely innovate, you put more bank on innovations that could turn out to be zeros. When you are constantly innovating though, your company spreads out this risk.
More importantly, you get better at testing ideas. Identifying problems and solving them before an innovation gets out into the workplace or on the market then becomes far easier to do, especially with a system in place such as design thinking.
You put your own ideas to the test.
The company with the best idea wins. Every time. At the end of the day, innovation is better business. As a business owner, manager, or team lead, you want your ideas to be tested and challenged, just like anyone else’s, because sometimes someone else will have a better idea.
It’s easy to fall into a pattern of selfishness and believe that we always have the best idea but in business, it’s imperative we challenge ourselves. Embrace the fact that no idea is a failure. An unchallenged idea or innovation, however, can lead to exactly that. Failure.
