That a robust business innovation strategy is the answer to a volatile market couldn’t be any more true!
At the moment, almost every company, large, small, or growing, is struggling to maintain growth and navigate uncertainties.
The reason is not only a competitive market but also the fact that as of August 2024, the global economic landscape has become a rollercoaster.
Global growth is slowing down, driven by tighter monetary policies and geopolitical tensions.
In fact, International Monetary Fund (IMF) projected that the growth rate will slow down to 2.9% in 2024, down from 3.5% in 2023.
Therefore, the need to be innovative and staying ahead in the innovation adoption curve.
Those businesses that understand what an innovation strategy is and how to create one will not only survive but thrive by turning challenges into opportunities.
Understanding What is Innovation Strategy
To begin, let’s define what is an innovation strategy.
An innovation strategy refers to comprehensively planning for innovation by aligning a company’s innovation goals with its broader business objectives.
You corporate innovation strategy must encompass everything, from product development and customer experience to operational efficiency and market expansion.
Essentially, it’s about generating outputs that drive your company towards its long-term vision while meeting immediate market demands. And, it ensures that your company is outdoing its competitors at every turn.
Say you own a smartphone company.
You naturally want it to become the global leader in the smartphones industry in the next five years. This is your long-term vision.
But the current market demands need you to focus on producing more traditional smartphones with better cameras, faster processors, and longer battery life.
So, how can you balance both small-term and long-term goals for you? The answer is strategic planning for innovation!
You will have to invest heavily in:
- developing foldable screen technology
- building a unique, high-performance foldable smartphone prototype
All this while releasing new models meeting immediate consumer demands.
Related Read: Roadmap for Innovation: From Ideation to Implementation
This is why you need a business innovation plan that’s resilient, adaptable, and proactive. A proactive innovation strategy doesn’t just respond to changes—it anticipates them, allowing your company to pivot quickly and effectively.
The Importance of a Proactive Innovation Strategy
Since we already asked you to imagine you have a smartphone business, let’s keep the imagine alive for a little while.
When you adopt a reactive innovation strategy, your company will develop foldable smartphone screens after competitors have already successfully launched such devices looking at consumer demands.
Whereas when your company develops foldable screens anticipating changing market trends and before consumers demand them, you are under the purview of a proactive innovation strategy.
The past year has shown us you need an innovation strategy in business, that too, proactive. And, the results are noteworthy.
In fact, a 2024 report by Deloitte found that companies with a proactive innovation strategy framework saw a 32% higher growth rate compared to those without one.
Why? Simply out, these companies were:
- not just reacting to market changes, they were driving them, leading to new market opportunities and increased customer loyalty
- continuously scanning the horizon for emerging trends, technologies, and customer needs
- committing to building generational innovation, not just as a one-time effort, but as a continuous process embedded in the company’s culture
As a reinforcement, we have added this Free Innovation Management ROI Calculator, so you can take a quick look at your interim ROI growth percentage after proper innovation management.
How to Create and Develop an Innovation Strategy?
So, how to create an innovation strategy that enables you to achieve higher ROI growth rate?
Your first step will be to conduct a thorough analysis of your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Generally called SWOT analysis. This analysis will help you identify the key areas where innovation can have the most significant impact.
For example, your smartphone company aiming to expand its product line will have to implement an innovation strategy that:
- leverages expertise in advanced hardware and software integration
- explores emerging trends, such as AI-powered features or foldable designs, to capture new market opportunities
- invests in emerging technologies like AI or IoT, which are already projected to grow by 18% and 22% by 2025 (Gartner)
So, once you have identified your innovation opportunities, you can develop your innovation strategy plan.
This plan should outline specific goals, timelines, and resources required to achieve your innovation objectives. Also, it is crucial to involve key stakeholders at every stage of the process to ensure alignment and buy-in.
Let’s go into the details!
Take in the customer’s perspective
To create an effective innovation strategy, start with the customer. Understanding unmet needs, desires, and expectations is critical.
Recent studies from 2024 highlight that companies focusing on customer-centric innovation strategies are 1.5 times more likely to exceed their business objectives. Use customer forums, social media, surveys, and direct interviews to gather insights.
When you start by listening to your potential leads, you’ll be able to empathize with them and work on creating solutions, features, and new functionalities that target their pain points.
Carefully monitor the competition
Always know your competition. It enables you to find out where you stand and what you need to do for your innovation positioning.
Find out:
- The idea management system they are using to meet their innovation targets. Pick a better system for your team.
- Their strengths and weaknesses.
- The kind of customer experience and support they offer.
- The innovation management system they have deployed lays a solid foundation for intellectual property management. Build a better version for your company.
- Whether they are soaring in the volatile market or plunging.
After you have answers to these basic questions, start analyzing your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Decide on your desired outcomes
Now that you are clear on your customer segments and the market landscape, your next step is to set clear business objectives. You must decide what you want to offer your customers and how you plan to differentiate your company from the competition.
You can do that by:
- Identifying your target audience out of the various customer segments.
- Understanding what you can do better than your competitors. Maybe you can offer better customer service or excellent user experience. It can also be a new feature that your prospects are pining for, but the competitors haven’t been able to provide them yet.
- Introducing an innovation strategy meant to justify your business needs and aspirations as well as promote an intrapreneurship culture within your organization.
Choose an innovation process
Approaches to innovation:
Routine innovation process
Often referred to as reactive innovation, you can pick this strategy to manage innovation if you want to serve your existing customers by listening to their demands and building on them. Companies with the routine innovation process turn to their customers for review, bug reports, and new requirements and use their existing capabilities to implement their specifications.
Disruptive innovation process
Such companies deploy active processes to create and roll out new technologies, solutions, processes, and business models in their existing industries. Companies with disruptive innovation processes strongly facilitate intrapreneurial activities internally.
Radical innovation process
It is a proactive innovation process that focuses on using their in-house talent and resources to bring breakthroughs that create a new market in their industry. They are well-prepared to respond to any disruptive innovation coming their way and even force their competitors to be active.
Architectural innovation process
Businesses that follow architectural innovation processes tend to upgrade their existing products, solutions, services, or technologies significantly. It enables them to have a decent innovation positioning in their industry.
Ensure your executive team approves and engages
Involve your key stakeholders intrinsically. It is impossible to implement an innovation strategy without taking a top-to-bottom approach. If you include your employees in a plan that the top management doesn’t embrace themselves, the plan wouldn’t work.
Remember, employees respond to reliable and decisive leadership.
You must ensure you have an approved budget and the right tools to implement ideas and inventions that will come your way once you introduce an innovation strategy. Otherwise, you’ll end up in a dud.
Loop in your workforce
Your employees are the backbone of your innovation efforts. In 2024, companies that engaged their entire workforce in innovation initiatives saw a 23% increase in successful product launches, according to Deloitte.
Let’s see, you now have:
- An understanding of your audience.
- An analysis report of your competitors.
- Your business objective.
- An innovation strategy.
- Support from the top management.
- A budget to put the plan into action.
So, your obvious next step is to schedule an innovation program meeting to bring your workforce on board. This program should aim at sowing the seeds of innovation culture in your organization or explaining how you plan to upgrade your existing culture.
You must grab the attention of your team members by communicating the strategy and your desired outcomes.
We strongly recommend you introduce a central and automated idea management system that requires minimal supervision and does not limit your employees. All you need to do is encourage adding as many solutions and ideas as possible without any limitations.
Related Read: Strengthen your innovation process with an idea management tool!
Your existing workforce, if given the opportunity, will help you in:
- Generating revenue through new products, services, and processes.
- Gaining a competitive edge by identifying emerging market trends.
- Creating a blue ocean strategy.
- Saving costs by using your workforce to come up with ways to streamline processes.
- Establishing your branding.
- Moving into new market segments.
- Satisfying your end customers.
- Building a sustainable innovation culture.
- Breaking down entrenched silos.
- Improving operational efficiency.
Don’t overthink and rationalize. Instead, try, fail, and try again until you succeed.
Prioritize
When you give place to strategic innovations at your workplace, you will be surprised by how many ideas and inventions you’ll invite.
This means you’ll need to know which idea needs immediate attention and which idea you can put on the back burner. It also means you must understand the need to manage your intellectual property. Otherwise, you’ll be at square one.
Know that ideas and innovation are interdependent and require management to bring profits and breakthroughs. Simply put, prioritize well.
Allocate resources for implementation
Firstly, understand that you will receive small ideas and ideas with huge potential. But you must show respect to both types. You should not and cannot ignore or reject ideas that you perceive unimportant.
When you are building an innovation culture, that means you have to pave the way for one and all. You need to show through your actions that you welcome ideas and suggestions.
It means that you must ensure that when an employee submits an idea to get a whiteboard in the common work area gets equal attention and appreciation as an employee who comes up with an idea to improve your product’s user interface significantly.
So, you’ll have to allocate resources for both small and big ideas if they are relevant and improve your productivity.
Create a prototype and test
Your innovation strategy must include an action plan to create a minimum viable product that can be used to penetrate the market.
After you have a novel idea or an invention and the resources to implement it, ensure you have a roadmap to create the prototype.
Creating a prototype and using it to test the waters helps us create use cases accordingly. These use cases, in turn, help us create new features and functionalities to improve the product.
Measure and evaluate your innovation strategy
Set key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your innovation strategy and whether you need to upgrade and improvise it accordingly.
These performance indicators can be:
- The number of ideas shared by employees in a month led to increased productivity and improved processes.
- The number of patent applications filed successfully.
- The increased percentage of product sales.
- The number of lead conversions.
Do not forget to evaluate whether every person in your organization is on the same page. And, even if anyone at any time asks them about your business innovation strategy, their answer turns out to be the same.
In Conclusion
How about we look at a few real-world innovation strategy examples from 2024 before we sign off?
Let’s talk about Apple, for instance.
Apple’s innovation strategy continues to focus on integrating advanced technologies like AR/VR into their product line. This allows them to capture a significant share of the growing AR/VR market. And, did you know that it is expected to reach $30.7 billion by 2025?
Similarly, Amazon maintained its lead in the e-commerce space by continually evolving its innovative product strategy.
Their recent investment in drone delivery systems is a prime example of meeting customer demands for faster delivery and at the same time nailing their logistics innovation.
Essentially, in the business landscape of 2024, you need an innovation strategy that is both proactive and resilient.
Get started today with InspireIP and see how your entire workforce can support your innovation goals.
