adapt or die

Your organization needs an innovation strategy. Adapt or Die. Leaders need to step up.

Why is it so challenging to develop and retain an innovative capacity? The issue is a failure to identify an innovation strategy that integrates innovation initiatives with the entire company plan, not only a failure to execute. 

Without a plan, companies will struggle to analyze the trade-offs of multiple methods, such as crowdsourcing and consumer co-creation. They may wind up with a jumble of approaches. They will work to build a consistent innovation system that meets their long-term competitive requirements, and they may be tempted to copy someone else’s. They’ll also have a hard time aligning various business portions around similar goals. 

An innovation strategy must include providing value to prospective consumers, how the firm will profit from that value, and which forms of innovation to pursue. Critics favor “disruptive” innovation over “regular” innovation, which builds on a company’s current technological skills and commercial strategy; however, this is a naive perspective. The innovation portfolio pursued by a corporation should be dictated by its specific competitive conditions. 

Only top executives can define an innovation strategy since innovation spans across departments. They must do so while also acknowledging that the approach needs ongoing testing and change like the innovation process itself.