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UK IDEA is all about business creativity and innovation. If you need to improve your business innovation, start here.
Businesses throughout the world are battling to be innovative. The European Commission has proposed that 2009 is the 'European Year of Creativity and Innovation'. What does this mean for member countries and businesses? The UK government defines innovation as “the successful exploitation of ideas”. This means that businesses need ideas to exploit. The source of these ideas will invariably be from within the business: from the people within the business. So for a business to be good at innovation the people in the business need to be able to produce ideas, and the business needs to act on the best ideas. These are two separate skills: Idea Skills and Business Skills. Both are essential to any company, and both should be part of any plan to increase business creativity and innovation within a company or country.
Most companies already have business skills. To improve, these companies must take on the responsibility for building an environment that maximises idea generation. This means that Senior Management must build an innovation culture that stretches throughout the organisation. This is essential because ideas can be created anywhere in the organisation.
UK IDEA recommends strategies including Idea generation, Decision making, Education and Analysis. These are the four elements in the company logo. If any are missed out, the IDEA process will suffer. Used correctly, a typical organisation may benefit in the following ways:
Marketing teams will generate new product and promotion ideas.
R&D teams will reduce project times, and provoke new discoveries.
Manufacturing will improve efficiency, profitability, and cut cost.
Sales teams will create new ways of increasing sales.
Every company is different and will have different amounts of time to spend on creativity. The key to success in each case is creativity on demand. Individuals must become instantly creative, to a competitive standard, even if they spend most of the time on other activities. For example a research and development team may spend 5 per cent of their working week on solving problems that need new ideas. In advertising the creative process is more dominant at the beginning of a project (though it doesn’t always feel that way). In both cases, when new ideas are needed, those creating them have to do so at the highest level.
Surprisingly it is possible to learn idea generating methods in a few hours, and these methods can save many hours each time they are used. Like any basic skill, idea creation methods will be used again and again, repaying the initial investment many times.
Is your company innovative?...
When did you last do an innovation audit of your company?
Simple measures can track your success. For example list all the products that you sell today. What percentage of those were launched in the last one, two, and five years? Now do the same exercise for your competitors. Next try a pie chart showing sales turnover, or profitability, against product age.
How can you increase your innovation skills today?
Innovation needs ideas. Everyone, and every business, can improve their own creativity, and their ability to generate ideas. Start with some proven techniques listed in the book review section of this site.
The long term key to idea creation is knowledge and the associations of normally unrelated ideas. What surprises most people is that knowledge helps creativity. The misconception is that a new idea somehow happens from nothing. People say this is why children are very creative. It turns out that children’s creativity is almost always a reflection of what is happening elsewhere in their lives. Having a limited knowledge-base forces children to make associations between normally unrelated subjects. When adults harness this ability to make unusual associations, then they have an enormous benefit over children, because greater knowledge leads to more possible associations.
The number of ideas that can be created by making unusual associations increases by having a wide and diverse knowledge.
How can a team be made more innovative, creative, and productive?
A team can be made more innovative in three ways...
Firstly when the team is formed, it’s members should be considered for diversity of skills and interests. Think of the analogy of a quiz team. If there are experts in a number of subjects, they will be able to tackle almost any question.
Secondly a technique for brainstorming or idea creation should be used (see book review section).
Thirdly the working environment needs to be right. Management are responsible for the environment, and this must encourage and reward creative activities. A good management team will have processes for encouraging new ideas, and turning them into products.
Do you measure ROI (return on investment) for innovation expenditure?
If innovation is important in your business, then you must be able to measure it’s cost, and it’s effectiveness. A company accountant could help set up a system. In addition there are tax incentives in the UK for research and development.
A simple way of measuring ROI is to start new projects that will have a measurable financial return. This is typical of a cost reduction, or a six-sigma project.
Are there software packages that create new ideas?
Software for innovation falls into two main categories; the first is for tracking and progressing ideas and projects. In many ways standard office software can be used for these needs. The second is for helping to generate ideas. This type of idea generating software is in it’s infancy, though progressing rapidly. Due to the nature of the market at this time we are not recommending any specifically. This type of software tool will become an important business tactic in the near future.
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