What is Business Innovation?
Business Innovation is about creating new and maximize business values by trying new ideas at a reasonable cost. If fail, then reiterate and tries again.
If your innovation team has not failed, that means they haven’t tried anything new, or the company and its leader doing it wrong.
Failure is part of the game
A healthy and effective innovation culture should encourage innovation failures, as long as this failure cost is affordable and the team can leverage the learning to innovate better next time.
External Consultant for Creativity & Inspiration
From my 20+ years’ experience working both as the innovation consultant and corporate creative & marketing lead, one of the best combinations for innovation is to have an external creative & innovation consultant to pair with an internal senior leader who has a lot of industry experience yet a passion to drive changes.
Worst is the reverse, where you have some so call experienced external consultants who really only done a couple related projects, then to trust them to work with a working team that does not have the best industry insights to make good judgments!
The innovation results will mostly end up in disaster if you do NOT have internal senior leadership as lead.
Internal Innovation Leadership as the key lead
In short, real innovation requires heavy senior leadership involvement, who also has a gut to take some reasonable risk and be responsible for making judgemental calls with their industry experience.
He/she need to make sound decisions on cross-industry innovation ideas that the external consultants are best at proposing with fresh perspectives.
Nurture internal innovation leadership
So if your company really interested in business innovation, the leadership team’s support and involvement will be critical to the program’s success, and the process will be a lot faster, cheaper and better.