Can innovations

But how can innovations actually be specifically promoted and what needs to be considered in this context? You will find the answers to these questions in this blog post. With the help of innovations, companies can give their businesses decisive impulses that can ensure their long-term survival in the fiercely contested market. Every new development starts with an idea. However, the development of innovations consists only to a small extent of the initial inspiration, since the usability of ideas in particular is often associated with a great deal of effort.

Thus, the best idea is of little use if it is not implemented correctly in practice and does not ignite as a result. If you use the wrong strategy here, you not only lose valuable time, but also have to reckon with financial losses. However, if the right strategy is applied, a single idea can quickly become a real basis for long-term success. The creativity of employees is one of the most important resources in the development of groundbreaking ideas. Thus, it is often spontaneous thoughts on the part of the staff that lead to successful innovations in practice.

Creative freedom is an important prerequisite for ideas of this kind to emerge in the first place. Here, the company is particularly in demand, as it is the responsibility of the company to create sufficient time for free space.

Under no circumstances should the creation of free space mean additional work for the staff. Furthermore, communication and exchange between employees and managers are extremely important in the development and elaboration of innovations.

But how can we promote innovation? Instead of competing with stubborn competitors in competitive markets, companies should try to win new and previously untouched markets or sub-markets. A good approach here is to define your own industry characteristics. Companies in the field of transmission technology , electromobility or smart building technology , for example, can interpret their core elements differently and thus achieve a completely new positioning.

A high diversity in terms of team composition is an ideal breeding ground for fresh ideas in practice. Inventing a new way of operating that achieves the target need not be simply a matter of crossing your fingers and hoping for inspiration. Following these suggestions should accelerate your efforts. Benchmarking within your own industry is unlikely to uncover breakthrough concepts.

But techniques used in other industries with seemingly very different characteristics may turn out to be unexpectedly applicable. For instance, in the s, Taco Bell transformed its restaurant operations by thinking about them in manufacturing rather than in fast-food terms. The restaurant chain reduced the amount of on-site food preparation by outsourcing to its suppliers, centralizing the production of key components, and concentrating on assembly rather than fabrication in the restaurants. Harvard Pilgrim Health Care has applied techniques of market segmentation, common in consumer goods but not in health insurance, to identify patients most likely to have a medical crisis and to intervene before the crisis occurs.

At its heart, every operational innovation defies an assumption about how work should be done. Cross-docking negates the assumption that goods need to be stored in a warehouse, build-to-order that goods should be produced based on forecasts and destined for inventory. Zero in on the assumption that interferes with achieving a strategic goal, and then figure out how to get rid of it. A major hospital, for instance, recognized that to increase the number of patients admitted for well-reimbursed cardiac bypass graft operations, it needed to respond more quickly to physicians who wanted to refer a patient.

The reason for the delay in response was the assumption that the hospital first had to assign a prospective patient a bed, a supposition that generated hours of delay and often led physicians to send their patients somewhere else.

The solution? Send the patient to the hospital immediately, and assign the bed while the patient is in transit. Companies often achieve extraordinary levels of performance under extraordinary conditions; their problem is performing extraordinarily in normal situations.

One way to accomplish this is to turn the special-case process into the norm. A consumer packaged-goods maker, for instance, based its production scheduling on sales forecasts rather than on actual customer demand.

When demand for a new product wildly exceeded forecasts, an ad hoc process was created that gave the manufacturing division real-time information about customer demand, which in turn allowed them to do production planning and product distribution much more efficiently. After the crisis had passed, the company decided to adopt this emergency mode of operation as its standard one. The results included a dramatic drop in inventory, an improvement in customer service, and a major reduction in the total cost of product deployment.

Designing operations entails making choices in seven areas. It requires specifying what results are to be produced and deciding who should perform the necessary activities, where they should be performed, and when. It also involves determining under which circumstances whether each of the activities should or should not be performed, what information should be available to the performers, and how thoroughly or intensively each activity needs to be performed.

Managers looking to innovate should consider changing one or more of these dimensions to create a new operational design that delivers better performance. In a similar way, conventional implementation methodologies often lead to failure when applied to disruptive modes of operation. Companies that follow traditional implementation methodologies inevitably take too long. There is so much to be done, and so much that must be integrated with everything else, that years can pass before the innovation is implemented and its benefits start to flow.

As more time passes and more money is spent without the innovation or its payoffs seeing the light of day, organizational support leaks away. Executive leadership then loses heart, and the denouement is inevitable. Another problem with conventional implementation is that it assumes that the initial specifications for an operational innovation will be accurate and complete. In reality, they will be neither. When envisioning new ways of working, it is impossible to get everything right from the outset.

Companies must be prepared to roll with the punches and learn as they go. An apparel manufacturer had to regroup when the technology underlying its plans for a new approach to production scheduling did not live up to expectations; a consumer goods maker had to scale back an innovation in logistics when its implementation became more difficult than expected.

Companies need to adopt a new approach to implementing operational innovations. This alternative method builds on an idea that is popular in software product development, an idea variously known as iterative, evolutionary, or spiral development.

Knowledge gained from these tests is then fed back into a fast-cycle iteration of the next version. Companies would also be wise not to try to implement an innovation all at once. Breaking a large-scale implementation into a series of limited releases creates momentum, dispels skepticism and anxiety, and delivers a powerful rejoinder to carping critics. When MetLife, for instance, was implementing a new process for installing coverage of a new customer, it did so in two releases.

The first involved the creation of a new role—a case-implementation leader, who was responsible for collecting all the information to establish coverage. In that release, a new project-management tool was also introduced to control the process.

But it continued to rely on old information systems to support the process. In the second release, a new information system was installed that facilitated data collection and the production of documentation and also offered enhanced reporting capabilities. Shell Lubricants followed a similar strategy when it transformed its order fulfillment process.

The first release brought all the departments involved in the process under a single manager. This easy-to-implement change quickly delivered a degree of performance improvement. The improvements continued when the next release brought people from the various departments together into cross-functional teams.

In the final release, each team member was trained to handle an entire order. This was the goal from the outset; Shell simply reached it in manageable steps. Even with all the benefits operational innovation can deliver, some executives may wonder if it is truly worth the effort. Why bother to be the first on the block to develop and deploy a new way of working? Why not let a competitor break that ground and then capitalize on its experiences, doing an even better job?

Indeed, where is the real strategic advantage in operational innovation at all? Once one company introduces a new way of doing things, all competitors can follow, and before long all are back on the same level playing field. In theory, that is a powerful argument, but in the real world, operational innovations have legs. Even today, not all auto insurers offer immediate claims response. At one major PC maker, an effort to do so was suppressed by both the head of manufacturing who was concerned that it would lead to outsourcing and the head of marketing who was afraid of alienating the retail channel , and top leadership was too preoccupied with other matters to intervene.

Toyota has confidently opened its factories to visitors from other automakers and yet continues to expand its productivity lead. There are many reasons why theoretically imitable operational innovations have staying power. As world leaders gather in Glasgow, and prepare to chow down at numerous COP26 buffets, food technologists urgently want them to grasp the role alternative proteins might play combatting climate change.

Researchers in many countries are looking for alternatives to traditional meat because farming animals is helping to drive up global temperatures. Even Hollywood stars have been jumping on the alternative protein bandwagon with with Leonardo Di Caprio among the most vocal. But aside from film stars, where are Wall Street and some of Europe's biggest institutional investors putting their money?

We take a look at three of the hottest areas of this deliciously weird science. Our thirst for non-dairy milk is already huge. One in three Brits now drink plant-based milk on a regular basis, says retail sector analyst Mintel. So, perhaps regularly eating meat that's never mooed, oinked, or encountered a farm may be a logical next step? No longer just the vision of a Margaret Attwood novel stuffed with chickienobs , in December , Singapore became the first country to approve the sale of protein grown entirely in a laboratory.

Scientists start by harvesting muscle cells from an animal, nutrients are steadily then added to feed those cells and grow the meat into tissue - this stew is called the cell media, which is then cultivated. San Francisco-based start-up, Eat Just, is now selling its lab-grown chicken nuggets in Singapore, a move that's part of the country's long-term security strategy so it can be less dependent on its neighbours for food imports. So, what are the barriers to many other countries doing the same?

Some countries have more appetite for this than others. In Europe, the Netherlands is at the forefront of lab-grown meat technology where analysts expect producers Mosa Meat and Meatable to push for EU regulatory approval in the next few years.

Investing in extensive customer and needs research is a key success factor for innovations. The more you know about your target groups, the better products you can develop and don't have to rely on half-true assumptions. The larger an organization is, the slower the processes often become.

Sluggish processes with long decision-making cycles can be a death sentence for innovations. In addition, there are often interface and communication problems.

All this has a negative effect on the quality and efficiency of innovation projects. This becomes more and more aware when you see how quickly start-ups can innovate. A closer look at start-ups reveals how the organisation itself influences success. There are many reasons why innovation projects or new products fail on the market. Usually, a failure is not related to the quality of an idea itself, but to its implementation, which means that it has internal organisational causes.

This is where business management and innovation management must start. You have to be aware of your own weaknesses and take appropriate measures. Because if an innovation is constantly confronted with hurdles, every innovation euro invested is a waste.

If, on the other hand, management creates a framework that encourages and strengthens innovation, companies with the same resources can achieve significantly higher innovation successes and thus generate additional earnings.

Born and raised in Vienna. We would be pleased to advise you on a possible cooperation to make your innovation management future-proof. Category: Innovation strategy. Success decides in the company A new product can fail on the market because it does not create real value and therefore cannot find customers.

Here is a compilation of four main reasons why new ideas and new products fail based on the Inknowaktion mini study: Reason 1: Wrong decisions Management often sets the wrong course in innovation projects or when selecting ideas.

The reasons behind this are: Lack of corporate and innovation strategy as a basis for decision-making. Insufficient or insufficient information as a basis for the decision. But it also happens that management's own beliefs dominate instead of facts, and decisions are made from the gut, which later prove to be false.