You know that innovation is a crucial part of sustaining a competitive advantage but how can you ensure that innovation is embedded into your strategy at a business level?
By equipping your management team with the tools and insight to identify opportunities for innovation in your business and the skills to implement new innovative ideas to improve the value you create through your products and services, or innovating within your value chain by optimizing internal processes.
It’s fair to say that some of the most effective innovations are led from the bottom up, in order to create space for this agility in your business, then it’s crucial that the leadership of an organisation understands and appreciates what innovation means and how to encourage it.
How a better understanding of innovation among the management team can help your business
Innovation is one of those terms that’s thrown around these days and when that happens, the meaning behind the word and the impact on your business can lose meaning.
If innovation is something that is already included in your business’ strategic plan, do you have a clear idea of where and how that will occur? Not many businesses can dedicate resources specifically to innovation and therefore it must happen organically in a business. With the right approach, innovation can be seamlessly integrated into how an organisation’s strategy is implemented with priority given to those areas that offer the most benefit to the company vision.
To identify opportunities for innovation, you often need to take a high-level view. If the management team are so caught up in the day-to-day duties that they simply cannot take a step back, then there may not be room for innovations to be discovered. Innovation training can equip managers with a toolkit of proven methods and approaches to take innovation from the abstract to the tangible.
Is innovation training right for your business?
In order to create space for innovation in your business it’s important for leadership to understand what innovation is. Good Innovation training begins with demystifying innovation as an approach and looking at it in practical terms, introducing tools that can be applied to different scenarios that break down the innovation process into steps.
Innovation training allows managers to adopt innovation mindset, and remove the association between innovation and invention. It enables employees and management to think broadly and creatively about the way in which your business does business, creating space for adaptation, improvement and optimization. It’s not always about reinventing the wheel.
If you want your business to be more innovative, to think more innovatively, and to be able to integrate innovation into planning then innovation training is not simply something that you can layer on top of a training and development program – it’s something that should be a part of the company culture, but that can start with training.
How is innovation training tailored to managers?
A broad range of innovation tools exists, and when looking at innovation from a management perspective, the “How” and “Why” these tools should be applied, is contextualized to align to a manager’s priorities.
While corporate level strategy concerns itself with a business’ competitive advantage in a market or industrial setting the management and leadership team concern themselves instead with business-level strategy. So, innovation training for managers will look at ways to identify opportunities for innovation in an organisation’s value chain, internal systems and processes and in managing staff.
Questions are explored such as:
- What does innovation mean to the individual and to the organisation?
- What examples of innovation already exist in the company and the industry?
- What are different approaches to innovation that can work in your type of organisation?
- How can you ensure that innovations align with the value your company offers?
CareerSpace Innovation Training
Career Space is innovation training starts with a top-down approach driving innovation from the management team, and finishes with a bottom-up approach bye equipping old stuff with the insight into how the business operates, the understanding of how to innovate processes, systems, services and products. And the space to look for and bring forward these innovative ideas to help your business.
Innovation is not something that can be bottled and sold. It is an approach, a culture, a perspective. And innovation training, especially when delivered across multiple layers of an organization helps people understand who is required for different aspects of innovation.
If you’d like your business to be able to think, plan, and be more innovative – then talk to us today.