Jim Stikeleather, Chief Innovation Officer at Dell Services, discusses the different tenants of innovation.

Innovation is an extremely important part of a business strategy; a great innovation strategy can often contribute to a company’s success and growth. In order for businesses to apply a successful innovation strategy, they must consider the principles behind innovation. This blog will discuss how innovation is important, and how these tenants of innovation all contribute to success.

Innovation is essential to survival, and all innovation is strategic. Since innovation is literally how organisations create their own futures, innovation as a process and an organisational priority cannot be separated from the development and implementation of strategy. Therefore, the development of a highly productive innovation capability is one of the most important strategic priorities for any organisation. At the same time, all innovation must be guided by strategic priorities and intentions.

There are many types of innovation: e.g., incremental, breakthrough products and technologies, new business models, and new ventures. Taken together, all of our innovation initiatives constitute a portfolio. As we design the portfolio we’ll have to decide how much effort and investment to allocate to each type of innovation. Each requires its own specific set of processes, tools, and teams, who will be engaged in the search for the future, which is what the search for innovation is all about.

The longer we wait to begin innovating, the worse things will get. Companies that procrastinate usually pay a heavy price in the form of lost market share, profits, and ultimately the lack of innovation can significantly diminish their future prospects. The competition isn’t waiting, so create the action plan and start implementing it now!

Innovation is a social art; it happens when people interact with one another. People are the core of any innovation process. Their insights, concerns, and desires shape the pursuit of new ideas and the decisions that need to be made during the process of transforming these ideas into value. Consequently, managing innovation is largely a process of managing people, and also managing the principles and practices according to the way their work is organised. This requires a great deal of thought, planning, and preparation.

Innovation without methodology is just luck. There are lots of creative people out there, and given half a chance they’ll probably create some great innovations. However, if we rely on their random efforts then we’re risking our future success on chance, and that’s not enough. We have to develop and apply methodologies to make the shift from luck to consistency, predictability, and sustainability. Without the right innovation methodology we’re risking far too much ‐ we’re risking the future.

Strategic innovation viewpoints are critical to success. You can’t rely just on the innovation efforts of top managers, people in the field, or of what only insiders can create. The complete innovation methodology has to leverage all four viewpoints: Top down, Bottom‐up, Outside‐in, and Peer‐to‐peer.

Great innovations begin with great ideas; to find them, identify unknown and unmet needs. There are many different kinds of needs. Among the most significant for innovators are the ones that no one has recognised, as these offer the potential to create breakthroughs that bring significant added value and competitive advantage. So how do you find them? There are dozens of tools that we can use to come up with new ideas, such as social media and crowd sourcing.

Ready, Aim, Aim, Aim, Fire. Yes, it’s a cliché. But it’s also true. Effective innovation requires very careful targeting. Why? Because there are so many possibilities to chase that we have to make sure we’re going after the right ones. Besides, innovation can be expensive both in terms of cash and time, and good aiming enables you to use resources wisely.

Prototype rapidly to accelerate learning. The goal of any innovation process is to come up with the best ideas and get them into action as quickly as possible. The innovation process is a learning process, and learning faster has enormous advantages. Among the methods for learning that we can choose, prototyping is one of the most valuable because it effectively condenses the learning process. Rapid prototyping is therefore central to most forms of effective innovation methodology.

There is no innovation without leadership. Companies are amazing expressions of human society. Organising thousands of people to create and deliver products and services around the world to thousands or millions of customers is a remarkable thing. However the ability to do this brings some unique challenges. In particular, the impact of the organisational hierarchy has tremendous influence on the culture of any company, how it works and the results it achieves. Thus, top managers can be powerful champions of innovation, or dark clouds of suppression. It’s up to leaders to ensure that their words and their actions support and enhance innovation efforts and methods. At the same time they must work diligently to eliminate the many obstacles that otherwise impede or even crush both creativity and innovation.

It is the established companies that are having the bigger struggle with innovation. Any company, no matter its size, must redefine the way that it can be of service to its customers. Companies must reengineer their processes to be more adaptive. Companies must improve, enhance, and even on occasion reinvent, their product and service lines—and do it all as innovatively as they can, with the goal of creating outcomes that the competition will be unable to match.