[List] Innovation initiatives you can start right now in your company12 min read

Innovation is one of the most important activities that increase competitiveness and organizational growth.

However, this isn’t an easy process that one can start and end in just a few hours. It takes time, effort, and resources to carry out.

That’s why it’s important to start small and begin on the most accessible initiatives that could spark the changes necessary to revolutionize and transform the way you do things.

But then again, what low-hanging initiatives can you start doing right away?

Low-hanging innovation initiatives to start now

Here are some low-hanging innovation initiatives that you can start working on today:

1. Ask business owners what their challenges are

The process of innovation is not always straightforward.

It’s usually required to establish an environment in which people are encouraged and allowed to freely explore ideas that may genuinely take your innovation objectives forward.

When you question company owners about their innovation issues, you are exposed to new ideas, alternatives, and possibilities.

You may benefit from their experiences and use what you’ve learned in implementing your future innovation endeavors.

Furthermore, if you encounter these issues in the future, you will already know how to handle them.

In the end, their difficulties will not only serve as motivation for you to endure.

They may also serve as a source of inspiration for developing products, processes, concepts, and services that others may have overlooked or missed to develop in the past.

2. Learn how to make an innovation question smaller instead of bigger

Businesses that seek dynamic growth must establish a culture in which questions are encouraged, accepted, examined, and answered effectively.

Questions frequently stimulate innovation, and a curious mind is what permits us to think about things we have zero to minimal knowledge about.

These inquiries may provide insight into areas where an unanticipated number of opportunities exist, directing businesses in novel directions where significant income and potential lie.

As history so frequently demonstrates:

New ideas spawn new industries, and established companies must be in a constant state of inquisitiveness so as to stay relevant. Questions must be asked unceasingly.

However, these questions must be asked in the simplest, most appropriate way possible. Not only for it to be understood well, but to prevent ambiguity, which may lead to thousands of irrelevant responses.

3. Visit other companies who have experience with innovation and share and learn

If you’re new to innovation, visiting other organizations with extensive expertise will give you a taste of what it’s like to operate the process within your organization.

You can get knowledge about the software, tools, equipment, and facilities required to carry out effective innovation.

You may also participate in brainstorming sessions and other companies’ innovation challenges, such as hackathons, to observe and use what you’ve learned when it’s your turn to host one.

Bring everything that you’ve learned from these events and share it with your team right away.

Furthermore, highlight the most important portions that you believe will be of help to them.

That way, you will be introducing them to new techniques or methods that they can use in their daily innovation efforts — not just for individual advancement, but also for organizational success.

4. Improve customer experience and management

Companies are actively recognizing the importance of customer experience in developing trust, engagement, and loyalty among clients.

Even though social media provides a quick route to building influence and support among audiences, businesses need to factor in the relevance that innovation plays in improving customer experience and management.

This is because innovation, besides fostering an environment for client relationship building and retention, also helps determine the levels of service quality that companies can offer to clients, which can then become the basis of improvements.

You can do this by:

• Reaching out to customers and engaging them in conversations that can provide you with information about their experience with your product or service
• Obtaining feedback through emails or phone calls
• Interacting with them via social media outlets
• Encouraging people to offer recommendations and, in certain cases, complaints
• Providing client assistance via live chat

5. Elevate collaboration and communication in your company

Real, functional, and effective workplace communication goes way beyond casual conversations.

It includes the exchange and sharing of knowledge, expertise, experiences, and ideas that may be beneficial in the organization’s efforts towards innovation and progress.

When employees combine their creativity, skills, and expertise, more issues are solved — more possibilities are generated.

In addition, stronger connections are built, and the overall productivity of the organization rises.

However, when it comes to increasing communication and collaboration in the organization, there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

The greatest thing you can do is to try a variety of ways until you find one that works for you.

Here are some methods that you can try implementing today:

• Increase inclusivity, particularly in internal communication and decision-making
• Develop recognition programs for teamwork
• Set goals as a team
• Avoid micromanaging employees
• Select collaboration tools accessible for everyone
• Encourage sharing of ideas and feedback, even when done anonymously
• Define goals, roles, and responsibilities of every member in the innovation team

6. Start by sharing ideas and learning to score ideas

The ability to collect ideas is important to the success of your innovation endeavors.

This is why it’s critical that you promote idea sharing at work, because the more ideas you collect, the better your innovation efforts will be.

Today, a growing number of firms acknowledge that great ideas may come from people both inside and outside the company. As a result, they communicate with both staff and consumers.

However, this method can generate a large number of ideas, which might feel a little overwhelming to review.

In the end, it might be tough to determine which of their proposals are viable. So understanding how to assess them and score them along with the assistance of your colleagues can make the process easier to handle.

7. Focus on execution (feasibility) instead of sexy ideas

A successful startup is the consequence of excellent execution combined with the right timing.

When you concentrate on execution, you gain the opportunity to critically evaluate the concept. You put it to the test to determine if the concept will stand the test of time once it hits the market.

While you will most certainly make mistakes along the way, you will get the insights that you need to determine where you should concentrate your time, efforts, and resources on. The business’s worth and structure are then reviewed in order to prevent future disasters.

During the execution process, your team may face a variety of ups and downs. But you need to persevere even more.

Because even if you’re only failing on a small scale, you need to focus and figure out what aspects need further enhancement.

Only then can you learn from your errors and progressively get things right. With further trial and error, you will discover new areas to optimize.

The more tests and prototypes you conduct, the more changes you will observe in the business, giving you the opportunity to deliver higher value to your consumers.

8. Make a list of 100 ideas before choosing an idea to execute as a project

It is critical for businesses to generate ideas in order to thrive and prosper.

As markets and technology evolve at a rapid pace, entrepreneurs must constantly innovate in order to compete, develop, and remain relevant to their consumers.

The key to creativity is ideas. There isn’t much to execute without them, and because execution is the key to learning, fresh ideas are required for any type of improvement.

It is evident that ideas alone will not result in innovation, since you must be able to create a systematic procedure for handling those ideas.

The aim of ideation isn’t simply to generate a lot of them — it’s also to pay attention to the quality of those ideas.

9. Streamline your innovation management process

Streamlining your innovation management process comes with a lot of benefits.

Aside from increased productivity that comes with automating processes and employing artificial intelligence, data becomes centralized for performing trend analysis, forecasting, and real-time feedback.

In addition, when a company streamlines its innovation processes, real problems are addressed rapidly.

With the application of idea management software, ideation activities are pushed through without any limitations, even when people are time zones and locations apart.

Lastly, with continuous innovation, organizations can focus on emerging innovation trends and formulating competitive advantage.

In the end, business growth happens, and more employees are given the opportunity to help the company achieve the peak of success.

10. Measure innovation progress (small dashboard)

Businesses nowadays use dashboards to measure business success. But not all of these organizations use the correct KPIs to track innovation performance.

An innovation dashboard contains all the necessary data that you need to measure the success of all the innovation activities that you’ve implemented within the organization.

It integrates all the appropriate sources and indicates your most essential innovation performance metrics.

Here at Accept Mission, we have created a built-in dashboard within the software that displays vital key performance indicators of innovation activities. This dashboard also provides connections to other dashboard tools like PowerBi, Tableau, Excel, and many more.

This dashboard may be used in creating reports that indicate how well you are doing in meeting your company’s innovation goals and objectives. It tells a story and conveys a narrative using pertinent data.

It should not, in any way, contain any irrelevant information. It must be shared readily with the right audience and must contain the latest information regarding your innovation initiatives.

It should be accessible to all relevant parties, including the management team, the innovation board, and the company’s board of directors.

Importance of improving your company’s innovation potential

Putting these low-hanging initiatives will slowly transform and revolutionize the way you do things.

In essence, it improves your company’s overall potential in conducting innovation activities, which could then become the foundation of your organizational success.

Start implementing these innovation initiatives today. Grab a copy of our innovation ebook here to learn more about what it takes to carry out your innovation activities successfully.