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.