Take a look at any successful enterprise and you’ll find innovation and an innovator at its core. Innovation is how people come up with novel solutions to important problems. The tricky part is that every organization faces different types of challenges. There are also those that innovate business models, marketing campaigns and many other things.
That’s why there is no one “true path” to innovation. There are, in fact, as many ways to innovate as there are types of problems to solve. From corporate giants to startups, here are the 4 things they do differently.
1. Seek Out Problems
Most people think that innovation starts out with a great idea, but the truth is that it starts with a great problem. Whether it’s Steve Jobs looking for product categories that “suck,” or scientists exploring the fundamental nature of the universe, every innovation starts out as a tough problem that needs to solved.
So hiring smart people and encouraging creativity are not enough. If you want to make your organization more innovative, the best thing you can do is to think seriously about how you search for problems.
2. Choose Problems That Suit Your Capabilities
The truth is that your innovation strategies as an innovator needs to suit your capabilities, strategy and culture. Just because something worked for someone else doesn’t mean it will work in your organization. You need to build your own innovation playbook.
3. Identify the innovation Strategies most likely to solve your problems
Too often, we treat as if every problem was the same, but that’s clearly not the case. In universities and coffee shops, or even over a beer after work, people are discovering out better ways to do things. There is no monopoly on creative thought.
Show me any successful innovator and I can show you another that is just as successful and does things very differently. The key to innovating effectively is not the objective merits of any particular strategy, but whether that strategy addresses the problem you are trying to solve.
4. Build a collaborative culture
Many thought that the digital age would lead to a more solitary existence. With so much you can access through your computer screen so you don’t have the need to go to the office. In fact, just the opposite has happened. While remote work has become a reality, it’s much harder to go it alone than it used to be. In fact, collaboration has become a competitive advantage.
Truly, breakthrough innovations are never a single event, nor are they achieved by one person, or even within a single organization. Rather, they happen when ideas combine to solve important problems.