More and more businesses now know and accept that they must innovate in order to remain competitive. However, true innovation management is still something that eludes them. They know it is about allowing ideas to flow, but how they can then embrace innovation software and the change that these ideas bring and turn them into something positive is something very few truly understand.

Why Innovate?

All businesses need to want to move forward and grow, otherwise there is no point to it. When a company grows, it becomes worth more. This usually goes through spikes and lulls, but the reality is that the sky truly is the limit when it comes to what a business can achieve. That, in itself, is an innovative idea to embrace.

Innovative business plans all try to find ways to advance in a manner that suits their company, surprises the competition, and ultimately works. This means that they must be practical and realistic, but also creative and out of the box. Unfortunately, we also live in a world where it must be shown that this will eventually lead to profits, by increasing effectiveness and/or by minimizing expenses.

Change is often expensive and it is also hard to identify what is being spent on, and whether or not that produces a return. True innovation has no start or end point, it simply flows, but that is very difficult to quantify. For instance, an idea may have cost $1,000 to implement, and five years down the line, a certain team increases production by $1,000. Whether or not that correlates is impossible to figure out, and whether or not five years of waiting equates a return on investment is even harder to understand.

But innovation is necessary, and it is working! It is about coming up with things that haven’t been done before, things that your customers weren’t expecting but, now that it is there, they feel always suited you. It is about standing out from the crowd in this world that is becoming increasingly overcrowded. Innovation is not about giving a business a blueprint of what they should do step by step to achieve a certain thing. That isn’t innovation, that is old fashioned strategy, and that needs to go out of the window.

Innovation management is about making that cultural shift and accepting creativity and the flow of ideas. It is about looking at an office such as Google and saying that having a relax room in the office actually is a good idea, because you trust that your employees are so committed to the organization that they won’t take advantage of it. Innovation is about grabbing the bull by the horns and going for it, daring to take that leap of faith, together with the rest of the team. It is about breaking down the barriers of both communication and hierarchy, and creating a linear team in which everybody is of equal value in terms of their ideas, minds, and contribution to the company.