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Innovation is risky business – embrace the risk in your business

The pearl diver
The pearl diver fighting the beast – a metaphor for the fear of innovation risk.

To innovate, you must embrace the risk. If it wasn’t risky, it wouldn’t carry the rewards.

Were the diver to think on the jaws of the shark, he would never lay hands on the precious pearl. – Saadi, 13th Century Persian Poet

You’ve already taken entrepreneurial risks by being in business. Don’t stop at business as usual. To survive in a competitive world and grow your business, you must increase your appetite for innovation risk.

“Don’t stop at business as usual. To survive in a competitive world and grow your business, you must increase your appetite for innovation risk.”

Businesses are rewarded for taking risks to innovate. If the innovation you have in mind isn’t risky enough, others can also do it and so the rewards would be small.

Innovation needs to carry enough risk to be considerably challenging for others to copy, and so, if successful, reward you sufficiently for the effort and risk you’ve taken.

Your innovation should give you a competitive edge. If it doesn’t and there’s no obvious commercial gain from your innovation, then you should seriously question if it is your business that should be doing that work.

Fortunately, there are ways to reduce the risk of innovation, particularly the financial costs associated with it. There are ways to share financial risks through sharing the cost of innovation with collaborators, and through using grant funding or soft loans. We can help if you need help with innovation risk management strategies, with finding collaborators, and with funding.

We have experience in forming collaborative partnerships, developing projects out of ideas, helping to identify end-user applications, working on product development, and putting forward proposals to funders and investors.

 

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Do you understand your innovation engine?

“Every organisation needs to understand their innovation engine – and you all have one, whether you realise it or not …”

Do you understand your innovation engine?

Innovation is every organisation’s engine for being more efficient and productive, for growth, for serving their existing customers better, for attracting new clients and for doing what they do better and better.

Every organisation needs to understand their innovation engine – and you all have one, whether you realise it or not – and here is a list of questions to ask yourself to help with this:

  • What are your innovation engine’s mechanisms – funding, roles, divisions, processes, tools and templates?
  • What fuels your innovation engine?
  • How often is it tuned up and who is the chief tuner or innovation guru?
  • How do you measure your innovation engine’s performance?
  • Do you have a competitive engine and do you actively compete with your rivals in innovation?
  • How much is your innovation engine internally focused and how much is it externally focused?
  • How do you identify innovation opportunities (competitions) to race your engine in?
Tune up and race your innovation engine

We can help you to understand and improve your organisation’s innovation engine by helping to formalise methods, identify opportunities, set up and manage an innovation funnel, pick innovation champions, and run a continuous innovation programme and strategy – rather than a start/stop programme with discrete, disconnected projects.

 

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Do you have an innovation funnel?

Do you have an innovation funnel?

Most businesses have a sales funnel. They formalise sales teams and divisions and use (mostly) formal methods to strategise, to create and manage sales leads and opportunities. They have a sales funnel and are constantly focussed on sales and identifying sales opportunities – after all, that’s why they are in business.

What about innovation? How much focus should an organisation have on innovation? And how much effort should you put into establishing innovation as a mainstream activity using innovation management methods?

“Just as you have a sales funnel for constantly pursuing sales opportunities, you must also have an innovation funnel for constantly pursuing innovation opportunities.”

Our answer is to undertake as much innovation as you can. Just as you have a sales funnel for constantly pursuing sales opportunities, you must also have an innovation funnel for constantly pursuing innovation opportunities. Not every innovation will lead to a new product, some may just help with productivity by rearranging the furniture – yes, seriously! But every organisation should care as much about innovation as it does about sales.

We can help you to identify innovation opportunities, set up an innovation funnel, select methods and tools to manage it, and run a continuous innovation programme and strategy – rather than a start/stop programme with discrete, disconnected projects.

 

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Operational Innovation – mapping core business processes

Battleship engine room – a metaphor for the complexity of business processes

We were engaged by a fast growing medical charity performing clinical healthcare operations nationally, to help map their core business processes and advise on operational innovation. The goals of the work were to meet the Information Governance needs required of organisations working in health and social care in the UK and to help in the change management required in moving to a new IT system.

In order to achieve these goals, we needed to achieve a thorough understanding of the work of the organisation, how it performed its various functions, and the IT infrastructure and degree of security and confidential of data storage and handling in place. By working closely with staff involved in the day-to-day running of the charity’s work, we were able to capture and graphically document their business processes, which until then had existed in disjointed spreadsheets, e-mails, know-how, and the personal experience and understanding of the charity’s staff and management.

The end result helped the organisation to not only meet the goals above, but additionally to help communicate their work and processes across the organisation and use the documentation we provided for training of new staff. When moving to a new IT system in order to streamline and simplify their various systems, the documented processes would help to identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies and security vulnerabilities.

We can help with your operational innovation needs by capturing and communicating your core business processes, and presenting them in a way that is directly relevant to your needs, be they Information Governance, IT system procurement and change management, process improvement and streamlining, or simply to give your organisation a clearer view of what you do and how – if as in our client’s experience, your processes have evolved in complexity and are inconsistently documented and inadequately shared across the organisation.