Driving Innovation
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Authors, Collins and Porras summarize their findings from 3M and provide five takeaways to drive Innovation at any business:
- “Give it a try–and quick!” - Essentially echoing on having a process to try out a lot of stuff, and keeping what really works. The key here is to do something. Keep on trying something new.
- “Accept that mistakes will be made.” - Learn from the mistakes quickly, and move on. Failures are part and parcel of what creates new innovation. Don’t repeat the same mistakes.
- “Take small steps.” - Experiment, but on a small scale. When something looks promising, go all out and seize the opportunity. This way one can do plenty of inexpensive experiments that create a funnel of would-be innovations.
- “Give people the room they need.” - Without entrepreneurship, there is no experiment. Without experiment there is no success or failure. People need some time, incentives, job security and room to experiment.
- “Mechanisms - build that ticking clock!” - How do you harness creativity and build innovation? It cannot happen simply by chance. Companies need to create practices and tangible mechanisms to experiment, try out new ideas and innovate.
These takeaways highlight the key areas of developing an innovation strategy that will assist you to achieve your desired outcome. By building an innovation strategy that will enable these drivers of innovation to be achieved will put you on the path to becoming an innovative organisation like 3M.
Links to subsections of this topic
Developing an innovation strategy
Types of Innovation Strategy
Integrating your business strategy
Prototyping
Driving Innovation
Summary