Innovation drivers create better futures.

Innovation drivers are all around us.

Your purpose and vision put a spring in your step and allow innovation drivers to emerge. The first thing to do when you want to begin looking for innovation drivers is to understand your purpose, vision, and objectives clearly. When this happens, you are in a position to align any innovation so that you maximise your time and investment. 

The underlying meaning of innovation is the words improve, create, and renewal. For innovation drivers to become meaningful, they must change the way they solve problems and make decisions. To see things and make things happen, they must choose to do things differently and make choices outside of their comfort zone.

Why do some businesses and organisations succeed when others struggle with innovation? It’s because the winners at innovation focus their strategies on building an innovative culture.

Before you rush into any innovation, looking for a solution, you must consider your options. It is wise not to spend a penny unless it is aligned with your direction and will improve your profitability, growth, and sustainability.

Innovations are often in plain sight, but when you take the time to think and reflect on them, you might see innovation opportunities in different ways.

Be careful not to overlook sizable opportunities that could have a real positive impact on your business. When you see a significant opportunity to innovate, it is often best to say “yes” and then work out how you will go about it.

It will always pay to explore the different innovation drivers that can provide new and exciting opportunities and then become creative. 

You must have the freedom to fail.

Peter Drucker says, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Culture is not the soft stuff most people think it is. A business’s culture can easily override strategies that cannot exploit this principle. “Culture is often both the toughest part of the strategy and the reason a strategy works”.

Sustaining innovation drivers will be rooted in a business’s culture of investing in change and exploiting the changes it invests in. This is the sweet spot of an innovation strategy. Get this aspect of your culture working, and your innovation strategies will have a fighting chance of success, eliminating behaviour that damages the probability of success.

A big, clearly defined purpose with the freedom to fail will pull you through all the struggles and disappointments. You don’t have to have a significant purpose from day one, but be ready to add up the little things as you move forward.

Experienced innovation leaders know that copying someone else’s ideas and processes will not have any real impact if their culture doesn’t know how to invest in reworking them to be even more innovative for their business.

Work on innovation drivers will have the most significant impact.

There are always new ways of creating innovation around logistics and customer service. Could you ever have imagined a drone delivering a parcel to your doorstep? This is where you can have the biggest and quickest payoffs. Other drivers might include:

• Customer’s problems, frustrations, wants and needs
• Flexible working arrangements
• The Internet of Things.
• Artificial intelligence.
• Big Data.
• Insight and foresight.
• Cloud computing.
• Globalisation
• Robotics
• 3D Printing.
• Hardship and social disadvantage.
• Environmental issues
• Analytics point to possibilities.
• People with a burning desire.
• Emotion, love is a beautiful thing. 

Within each of these innovation drivers, there will be many opportunities to explore and open up significant possibilities to improve the way you do business.

Quotable Quotes

“You have to be burning with “an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right. If you’re not passionate enough from the start, you’ll never stick it out”.  Steve Jobs

“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favour”.  Elon Musk