Below you’ll find a list of behaviours that I have observed in companies that are often ranked high on innovation. Put yourself and your organisation to the test by, as honestly you can, tick off, one by one, those that your organisation does too.
When you have done so, look at those that you didn’t tick off, and consider, for a moment, the effects you would see if you did one more from this list. Would it benefit your clients or would it burden them? What would it take to make that change in the coming three months? What would be your next action? When can you start?
Did you tick them all off in the first go? Then you have my sincere congratulations!!! You seem to get some really important things right. Please share your insights and experiences to the world!
Innovative organisations:
- carefully observes their target users and customers to understand their ambitions and aspirations.
- creates solutions for the purpose of helping their clients achieve their goals, not to meet their every demand. As illustrated by the quote attributed to Henry Ford, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
- fails early, by quickly developing and evaluating prototypes before losses in time and money poses great risk.
- sees opportunities and learns where others would see failures, search for scapegoats or even punish those who had the courage to take risk
- lowers associative barriers by engaging persons from a wide variety of cultural, educational, and commercial backgrounds.
- starts with small and highly competent teams and time-boxes, uses budget to engage great talent and create great circumstances as opposed to spending the budget on more staff to cut lead times.