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14 Jun 2017

Failure paves the path to innovation

Lauren Timmer-Somer Head of Communication Technology Services and Head of Marketing and Brand Communications
World of Change & Innovation

Budgets are important but strategy is more important

Businesses do not need more budget to innovate new processes and systems for bringing services and solutions to customers efficiently, cost-effectively, and quickly. But they could learn to fail.

Budgets are important but the initial strategy is more important. Budgets will quickly be wasted if there’s no cohesive strategy linking all parts of the organisation. Cohesive strategy relies on everyone in the business understanding the need to innovate as well as actively participating in it.

Innovation without strategy leads to despair. Great ideas may not be a dime a dozen but stories about great ideas never seeing the light of day are uncomfortably common. Good ideas alone are no guarantee of success. Nokia, Yahoo! and many other companies had great ideas but poor strategy failed to give them markets.

Businesses must get their people to commit to coherent policies to develop behaviours designed to achieve competitive goals. Budgets will follow once that task is complete not least because policies resulting in behaviours will help clearly define what’s most crucial and what can possibly be cut from the budget.

Companies that don’t foster cultures striving for innovation often look to successful businesses for guidance on how to recover market share. The idea seems to be that what made those companies successful must also work for this company. But it’s easy to misinterpret what made the other company successful; many mistakenly believe it was the systems and processes the other company adopted. In essence that’s true. But those systems and processes don’t necessarily fit your requirements, which must be based on the needs of your own customers, your own markets, and your own business capabilities. We can’t all be Apple, Starbucks, and Uber.

In arriving at innovative organisations probably one of the most empowering cultures to adopt is a culture of failure. People, particularly business leaders, must be able to accept that their businesses, operated by people who are nothing if not fallible, have failed, are failing, and will fail in at least some way. It is the only way to find points or whole areas where innovation is required and what that innovation should resemble.

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