Successful innovation isn’t just about coming up with an idea for the next big thing…

True innovation requires ownership and agile execution in order to succeed. And organisations who don’t embrace innovation shouldn’t be surprised when they are left behind by their competitors.

Most organisations do incremental innovation pretty well. But in order to tackle transformational innovation, you need to look at your market with a very wide angle lens, and take in views and ideas from many different sources. Both internally and externally.

We went through a transformational change a number of years ago. Changing our business model from a network of retail stores selling printer consumables to an organisation that provides problem solving business solutions (print technology, telephone systems, office supplies & IT) to small organisations.

You have to be honest about your organisations strengths and weaknesses to understand where you have capacity to manage specific innovation tasks. And where your team may lack the resources or skills necessary. There will be occasions where you simply have to plug skill gaps with outside resource so you can speed up the process, whilst planning how to grow your teams experience in the long term.

It’s important to be open to innovation from all parts of your organisation too. I’m always surprised. Our team see things differently to me, and have their own unique perspective when it comes to identifying new opportunities to be innovative.

And most of the time they have better ideas than me anyway. Certainly when it comes to developing cost saving ideas and products to better serve our existing customers. The aim, is for your whole team to continually look for ways to bring in other perspectives to think about and implement innovation within the business.

Large corporations have many stakeholders. But small organisations like ours have a core group of team members, who all need to feel their ideas are valued. And feel their innovative ideas will be adopted and implemented without question, if proved to make a difference.

This is how we work in our organisation. Ideas from every team member are valued. From Mike our driver, Chris in the warehouse, through to Kerry in sales administration and Maddie in operations. If any team member has an idea we stop, listen and debate. And if we all decide its a good one, we run with it and make it happen. In small organisations the speed of innovation can happen much quicker too.

Many of our products, processes and systems have developed in this way. And I can’t think of a better way to run an organisation than giving the whole team a voice (guaranteed to be heard) if they feel there is a better way. Whether it’s for our internal processes and systems, new product ideas or just to tweak an existing service to provide our customers with a better experience. It’s all innovation and it all counts.

Innovation is not a one off exercise. It’s something that your whole organisation should live & breathe every day. We do. And this is why our customers benefit from market leading products that solve their problems and are designed to provide them with cost & service certainty, leading to total peace of mind.

Is innovation the responsibility of your entire team too?