Practical Innovation: Finding a Solution

Article Contents

Practical Innovation consulting is about creating added value for the business, stakeholders, and customers. It involves identifying new processes, tools, technologies, or models that can help take the business effort to the next level.

The impact of innovation can then be evaluated at the customer solution level or anywhere throughout the supply chain. It all depends on where the innovation is implemented and the outcomes pursued as a result of the improvement.

It involves identifying new processes, tools, technologies, or models that can help take the business effort to the next level.

The innovation pursued will depend on the company’s business model, forecast of future opportunities, tolerance for risk, and ability to pursue novel opportunities. These characteristics decide how the opportunity vs. risk is evaluated and how new opportunities are selected for development.

When lobbying for internal innovation the first question a business often faces is ‘what is innovation’ and what ‘type of innovation’ are we able to pursue?

The topic of innovation is often confused with creating an entirely new technology but fails to consider the new processes, tools, or models used to get there. Each step towards delivering a new offering to the customer can involve innovation and provides opportunities for businesses to improve.

Innovation can be incremental in that it involves improvements built upon a preexisting foundation and improves one step at a time. It can be iterative in that the next improvement represents a significant (but related) departure from the previous offering. Or it can be disruptive by offering an entirely new solution to solve the customer’s problem. 

The solution requirements must be supported by the business model to be realized consistently. If the business model is unable to deliver these requirements on a consistent basis the first step involves building that capacity.

Offerings that do not solve an existing problem can still be innovative but these need the business to potentially develop a new market where the solution is valued and the problem has been identified.

When discussing Innovation the executive team will often pursue unnecessarily lofty heights that miss the opportunity to Wow! existing customers. In these efforts the business may choose to avoid opportunities for Innovation because the risk is considered too great. Or may decide to pursue the disruptive innovation despite little experience in the space. The former represents a potentially significant opportunity missed where the latter represents a potentially catastrophic failure. A foundation for pursuing Practical Innovation is needed.

In the consulting space the customer is rarely looking for help with Innovation. It is definitely more common for customers to pursue solutions to existing problems.

These existing problems are defined and labeled based on preexisting taxonomies, labels, and assumptions. They also may be reinforced as a result of these same mechanisms.

The Innovation Consultant then uses their knowledge and experience to evaluate the ‘present performance to future desired performance gap’. Business models that are able to pursue Innovations across the performance gap have a significant competitive advantage.

Practical Innovation solutions are then suggested depending on the business’ readiness, capacity to delivery innovative solutions, and their understanding of the customer’s business model, industry, and current/future customer requirements.

Conclusion

Practical Innovation begins with a discussion of what are the business/customer’s current pain points? What problems need to be solved? What solutions are now available? How of the current solutions performed? The gap between current and desired solutions represents the business’ opportunity to support Innovation.