"We need to secure future growth, we must be more innovative”
There is no secret that many companies are struggling now days to keep up with pace, digital development and new business models. As a consequence the statement ”We need to secure future growth, we must be more innovative” is often heard in leadership/management meetings, at town hall sessions, in board meetings etc.
A quite common action then is to bring an agency onboard and perform ideations in form of design sprints where the output is concept sketches in the end. Sessions and concepts that often are communicated widely internally to make a buzz to showcase that “we are more innovative”. We don’t say that ideations, design sprints and concept sketches are wrong. We are only questioning the ratio between number of ideation initiatives, post-its and power points that in the end actually have an impact on a company’s EBIT-margin and by that secure future growth…
Despite lack of scientific facts, we have formulated a number of statements that we believe represent the struggles going on today. We think that a lot of companies can relate to either one or several of the statements.
We have margins that are ok but they are declining and we are not compensating the decline with enough profitable organic growth.
We have great assets and capabilities within the company but we don’t capitalize on them to its fullest extent as we think tech first creating a huge loss of potential to increase customer relevance and speed up time-to-market.
We have great people but their contribution to innovation is limited and besides not harvesting the tribal knowledge we miss out in developing skills relevant for the future.
We have several ongoing initiatives in our company unfortunately often executed in stovepipes where levels of collaboration and coordination needs to increase a lot to maximize the output.
We are part of an interesting eco-system but we don’t integrate other companies offers in to our customer-facing solutions and thereby losing a lot of opportunities for new business and growth.
We have a performance driven culture focusing primarily on short-term objectives that blocks us from taking bold decisions related to our long-term development.
Our strategy clearly articulates that Innovation is one of the key carriers to successfully fulfill the strategy but we do not have a way to address it leaving us with open questions how to protect and expand our core business as well as unleashing new growth.
What we have learnt throughout the years is that there are no short cuts. Ideations, design sprints and concept sketches are part of the solution, however only a small part. A company that should transform and accelerate innovation in order to secure future growth needs a holistic and customer-centric approach where strategy, engagement and execution are working in symbiosis where each block has its specific purpose:
Strategy: Where to innovate and explore in order to achieve sustainable profitable organic growth.
Execution: Improving the quality – and accelerating the pace – of the innovations.
Engagement: Shaping the internal and external community to foster and consistently deliver new innovations thru collaboration.
All initiatives that are initiated and executed as part of the holistic and customer-centric approach needs to be linked to each other and serve the same purpose:
Create focus
Accelerate efforts
Trigger profitable organic growth
Strengthen the brand(s).
More detailed learnings or for that matter how the holistic approach could look like in form of which initiatives to run are in themselves a foundation for a bunch of blog posts, but until then…
Next time someone say: ”We need to secure future growth, we must be more innovative”. What will you do?
/Joachim Rask
