Innovation Management for Sustainable Profitable Growth
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There is an important problem in innovation management. The trouble is that many companies are overly focused on managing the present, forgetting that the business models that brought the company to the present might not work in the future. Managing a company with yesterday's business model is like navigating with an old map. What it takes to succeed today and what it will take to succeed in the future can be two very different things. For this reason, we know that many companies are destroyed while minding their daily business.

Of course, the priority in any company should be "flying the airplane". However, if a plane tries to fly continuously, it will eventually crash. It is necessary to be fueled at the right point, to determine new waypoints, and even to change the aircraft at a certain time. Managing Today is extremely important in companies. But if everyone constantly manages today with old skills, old hardware and old business models, then danger is near.

On the other hand, in some companies that carry out innovation studies, there is a choice between extending this effort to the entire company or limiting it to a selected group. Having worked with many companies, we can say that such a choice is not very correct. What benefits the company in the long run is to bring the overall employee base to innovation. This approach is especially important for companies that want to embed an innovation culture. The best way to include the general employee body in the innovation effort is to ask for ideas and contributions from them and to establish the right systems for this. Suggestion systems that are titled with questions like "Do You Have an Idea?" are not the correct approaches here.

DIFFERENTIATE TODAY AND TOMORROW

There is a difference between the innovations that companies make to continue to be successful with their current offerings and business models, and innovations that will create the future. 70% of the innovations realized in large companies are Incremental or linear innovations made with existing business models and existing competencies. They are targeted to improve the current business. These kinds of innovations are part of managing today. In order to realize discontinuous or non-linear innovations related to creating the future, different approaches are required compared to managing the present. In companies, innovations that require new competencies and new business models are around 10% of the total. However, small as they may be in percentage, these have the potential to surpass others in impact.
Recently, with the reemergence of the concept of “Intrapreneurship”, which is actually an oxymoron, innovative employees with an entrepreneurial spirit are tried to be mobilized to create new businesses. Small groups formed around these people can be motivated to create future businesses that diverge from the company mainstream. However, there is an issue to be aware of. If the company expects all of its innovation outcome from these small groups, then a significant part of the innovation potential of the company would be untapped . Furthermore, the rates of trial and error and mistakes are higher in projects in completely new areas, even in the early stages. The projects related to creating the future may be lost in the daily workload of the company for various reasons, which puts the future under risk. Therefore, it is necessary to balance leap-type innovations with incremental innovation projects in terms of both overall impact as business results and organizational motivation.

An important point in creating the future is to get rid of the dominant mindset of the past. Creating the future can be difficult if companies aren't ready to forget their past ways of doing business. Especially if there is any doubt about whether change is necessary, then disaster is near. Where companies are at their strongest, they should take steps that obsolete their own products and ways of doing business. Otherwise, others may come and do it for them.

Contact us to learn how you can create tomorrow while strengthening and securing today.