Innovation - The Critical Driver of Business Growth

By M. Isi Eromosele

In the current highly competitive global marketplace, an organization’s ability to innovate has become an increasingly crucial brand differentiator. Organizations need to recognize the competitive importance of innovation and implicitly recognize that. For innovation to be a truly growth strategy, it must be approached as a strategic business initiative, with a focus on achievement. As such, before an organization implements a wholesome innovation strategy, they must define innovation within the context of its business goals. The following factors need to be considered:

• Is the primary purpose of innovation to create new products, new markets or better ways of relating to customers? What business gains would the organization realize from the soon to be implemented innovation strategy?
• Which employee groups are most vital to the implementation of the innovation strategy? As an example, if the creation of new markets is the goal, sales and marketing would be crucial to its success
• Is the innovation strategy expected to be incremental or wholesome?
• How would this innovations strategy affect the corporate culture of the organization?

A corporate culture that does not fundamentally sustain work progress and behaviors that encourages innovation will ensure that such strategy will fail. The success of an innovation strategy is not a function of financial investment, but really depends on the quality of the organization’s innovation processes. To succeed, innovation efforts must be aligned with the organization’s business strategy and its organizational  systems and structure. Innovation cannot succeed if it is attempted in a vacuum. It must be an integral part of the organization’s overall business strategy. It must be an integral part of how the organization operates. .

Creating A Culture Of Innovation

There are a number of levers companies can pull to drive innovation within their corporate culture. These levers can be grouped into the following categories:

Technology – What changes in product or underpinning technologies can be made to provide new or unmet customer needs?

Process – Which processional activities need to be changed to increase the efficiency of the creation of new products and their effectiveness?

Structure – What changes are needed organizationally to increase innovation within the company?

People – How does the company align the decisions and behaviors of innovation critical talent with other employees to create a hybrid culture that drives the concept of innovation?

Every organization has multi-faceted processes and levers it can use to drive innovation-focused decision making and behavior. Interestingly, these levers are hardly exploited to their potential as operational and management tools.

Performance Management

Focus specific lines of business on achieving growth targets that are significant stretch, while placing secondary considerations on profit making. This will force business unit management to aggressively pursue innovation in order to accomplish the growth targets. As part of the budgeting process, an organization could conduct annual meetings with the leaders of each business unit, challenging them to identify additional growth opportunities through innovation.

Roles/Career Progression

In identifying roles that can serve as innovation champions, organizations can capitalize on the sharing of best practices and avoid duplicative efforts. As an example, employees in a particular department could be designated as such champions and explicitly tasked with both leveraging best practices from other parts of the organization to improve the performance of the department.

Business Literacy

By educating managers, supervisors and employees o how innovation drives business performance, they can better appreciate the economic impact of such innovation, understand how employees in different roles can drive innovation and learn how they  may contribute individually and collectively.

Innovation is the perfect antidote for companies struggling for growth. Companies that can put innovation on the same economic footing as other strategies through a value-driver framework will have greater success realizing its full potential.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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