Innovation is all about creating new value for individuals who are willing to use it and even pay for it. A strategy, in layman’s terms, is a plan for harnessing. Let’s find out what is an innovation strategy and how can an organization develop it for their growth.
A strategy is making choices between several feasible options to create the best chance at “winning”, whereas innovation is one of the means that will help you achieve your strategic goals. It is actually quite difficult to achieve long-term success and orient the business for speed without a good strategy.
What is an innovation strategy?
Innovation is all about creating new value for individuals who are willing to use it and even pay for it. A strategy, in layman’s term, is a plan for harnessing. For instance, marketing, operations, finance, as well as R&D are done to achieve a competitive goal.
To clarify, innovation strategy isn’t just about innovation tactics, like setting up idea challenges, but it is more about mapping an organization’s vision, mission as well as value proposition for a more defined customer market. It sets boundaries to your expectations of innovation performance by structuring and simplifying your innovation work so that you can achieve the best possible outcome through the same.
Steps to develop an innovation strategy
- Align innovation and business strategy
Successful innovation efforts must be in step with your complete business strategy. To set the stage for the most effective innovation, people across the company must understand the real corporate goals. That includes understanding the market where the business plans to work because the best innovations only respond to the needs of the customers or the potential customers. You also need to keep in mind the competitors.
- Determine your value proposition
Your strategy should answer all the questions like what unique value you will bring to the market and what types of innovation will let you capture that same value and, at the same time, build a competitive advantage.
- Learn the unmet needs of the organization’s customers
Most of the innovations that are successful meet the needs of the customers that you want to serve. To develop these innovations, your organization must understand the needs of the customers, and sometimes even before the customer realizes that they have those needs.
Consider crowdsourcing input from your employees to help uncover all their knowledge of customer needs. Now, this can be a valuable approach for gathering data on where you need to focus your innovation efforts.
- Assess and adjust
The best innovation strategy plans are usually very flexible. Make sure you take time to assess and check the effectiveness of your organization’s innovation strategy with the help of crowdsourcing among employees.
As customer needs and the market needs change, you and your organization should be willing to adapt the innovation strategy to better fit reality. Keep crowdsourcing for employee input and keep adjusting your strategy to meet the current needs.
