One of the important keys to future proofing your business is to ensure that you continue to innovate, eradicate all of your customer’s pain points because if you don’t do it and disrupt yourself, someone else will, threatening your future.
In order to continue to innovate you should ensure that one of the key characteristics you should look for when hiring is the ability of the prospect to be innovative.
You should identify innovation champions throughout the organisation, encourage them and support the development of innovative ideas in every aspect of your business, particularly maximising opportunities presented by digital change
You should identify innovation champions throughout the organisation, encourage them and support the development of innovative ideas in every aspect of your business, particularly maximising opportunities presented by digital change
You should reward innovation.
At 3M, 15% of employees time can be spent creating whatever they want. It was this philosophy for example that led to the creation of the Post it Note.
Google employees are encouraged to spend 20% of their time similarly.
You should also embrace failure. Each failure moves the company one step closer to success. Give failure a positive value.
For example, if a successful product brings in $100 million in sales, and it took 9 failures to succeed, each failure in can be viewed as generating $10 million. For some psychological reason, the attitude encourages experimentation as it takes the stigma off failure.
For example, if a successful product brings in $100 million in sales, and it took 9 failures to succeed, each failure in can be viewed as generating $10 million. For some psychological reason, the attitude encourages experimentation as it takes the stigma off failure.
Amazon's vice president for global innovation policy and communications, Paul Misener, told Retail Week's tech conference in London this week what they can learn from the ecommerce giant's growth.
His message was that to do new things you have to be willing to fail. It's OK to be wrong, it's OK to make mistakes — it's OK to fail.
His message was that to do new things you have to be willing to fail. It's OK to be wrong, it's OK to make mistakes — it's OK to fail.
Amazon, has a lot of experience with failure. They have failed many times — some very public, colossal ones, some private.
He cited Amazon.com Auctions — an early eBay competitor — and zShops — mini-shops for other retailers within the Amazon site — as examples of past failures. But learning from these experiments contributed to the success of Amazon Marketplace, which allows other people to sell over the website.
He cited Amazon.com Auctions — an early eBay competitor — and zShops — mini-shops for other retailers within the Amazon site — as examples of past failures. But learning from these experiments contributed to the success of Amazon Marketplace, which allows other people to sell over the website.
Now fully half of the things sold on Amazon are not sold by Amazon but through other partners. It was this willingness to fail and trying to get things right eventually finally that led to this very beneficial way of doing business.
The key to innovation is experimentation, and to experiment, you have to fail. If you're not willing to experiment you'll never actually innovate and if you want to experiment you have to be able to fail. You should try to fail so that it fails quietly, not loudly externally.
Willingness to fail is a big deal because you've got your boss, maybe an investor, maybe the media looking for failures. No one likes to fail but if you accept that failure is necessary for innovation, it becomes a lot easier to deal with
No comments:
Post a Comment