Organisations of all sizes often find themselves at a crossroads when it comes to innovation—how do they keep up with changing customer needs and maintain an edge over their competition?
With the right strategies and the right kind of external pressure, you can drive innovation within an organisation. As an Innovation Consultant for Innovolo, I have come to understand that assessing your company’s culture and level of maturity is key to analysing the effectiveness of innovative strategies.
In this article, I will discuss the three main areas in which organisations can be categorised when assessing where they stand when innovating: owner-driven innovation, incremental improvement and organisational evolution.
By analysing each area from an innovation maturity benchmarking perspective, we can better understand what kind of competition – if any – is necessary for driving internal innovation.
Owner-Driven Innovation
Although the first stage of innovation often begins at the owner-driven level, collaboration between stakeholders is necessary to ignite meaningful progress.
In particular, competition between stakeholders can be beneficial because it forces owners to deliberately increase their awareness of market conditions or customer needs, thereby stimulating product and service improvements. However, cooperation among players in the industry is necessary for such an effort to be sustainable in the long run and can act as a barrier against essential breakthroughs.
Ultimately, collaboration is essential to spurring innovation and optimising growth potential.
Incremental Improvements
As companies increase investment in long-term strategies, they evaluate efficiency gains from improved technology or changed processes.
By having greater leverage over operational costs, organisations are better able to make customer experience enhancements or even expand their resources to gain a competitive edge in the market. Not only does this enable small companies to grow faster than projected, but it also keeps larger organisations on their toes. It forces them to stay on top of market trends.
Organisations that can derive the most value from strategic investments will achieve superior results and reap greater rewards in the future.
Organisational Evolution
Large enterprises must undertake a profound internal assessment of their core operations to remain competitive within the shifting customer needs and disrupted industry trends.
It is not enough to become reactive; rather, these companies must actively prioritise adaptation to enable them to make significant progress despite external changes. To do so, uncovering resources and leveraging strong motives provide the necessary drive for businesses to redesign processes quickly but thoughtfully. They can secure success in their chosen market space by maintaining a seamlessly adaptable infrastructure in an ever-changing environment.
So we’ve established that there are different levels and contexts within which organisations approach innovation, but do we need competition to drive innovation within an organisation? Yes! Depending on your culture, budget and resources available different strategies may work best but often overlooking external pressures such as those derived from competitors is a mistake as this could give you an edge over other players within the same space.
Everyone wants access to better products and services offered at lower prices, so business leaders who understand how all these concepts fit together will find themselves well-positioned no matter what sector they operate in—assuming they take advantage of mature models like Innovolo’s Innovation Maturity Benchmarking Framework which was designed specifically for enterprise success!