Sustaining Innovation

Start-up businesses are all about innovation – building something new is usually their reason for existing.

But as they become established the day-to-day of current operations and products can get in the way of building the next new thing.

This tension needs to be managed so that you can do both.

Keeping Track

Start by acknowledging that there are two different things that must be done:

• Support for and development of existing products / services / customers.
• Development of new ones – innovation.

Be clear – with yourself, and with everyone – into which category work sits, and put systems in place to capture how much time is spent on each thing.

Use these systems to make sure you are putting enough effort into each thing – check that short term customer priorities are not squeezing out new innovation.

Give all of your staff the opportunity to work on new innovation projects – build a single resource pool so that you can allocate anyone to anything.

Communicate regularly that there is time and effort allocated for innovation – give specific examples of what you mean by innovation.

Ambient Innovation

Encourage innovation all of the time – so that it becomes part of the culture – just the way people work and think.

• Collecting ideas for new products and services as they arise – for possible later development – making sure that enough of them do get developed.
• Clever ways to solve a problem or add a new feature.
• Thinking innovatively even about bug fixes.

Make a point of celebrating innovation – talking about the great new ideas – and more especially, about the smaller scale things.

Provide Stimulation

It’s hard to innovate in a vacuum, so expose your people to outside influences:

• Customers – their problems and their needs.
• Competitors – how they do things.
• Other businesses in other markets – there may be some parallels.
• Exhibitions and conferences.

Whenever you mix people up, encourage them to talk innovation and ideas. It’s a shared language amongst engineers – so a great starting point for any conversation – and innovation is often about bouncing ideas off others.

Points to take away …

• Acknowledge what work is day-to-day and what is new innovation, keep track of both and make sure you are doing enough of each.
• Give all of your staff the opportunity to work on new innovation.
• Encourage ambient innovation and celebrate it, both the big and the small scale.
• Expose your staff to outside influences to help stimulate innovative thinking.