You Need an Innovation Strategy

Key Question: Why innovation strategy important for company to sustain their performance?

Issue: How should be good innovation strategy?

1. How to create innovation strategy which will help achieve company sustainable competitive advantage?
2. How to survive against prevailing winds?
3. How to manage trade-offs?

Root Causes: The root of hardship in building and maintaining innovation capacity is lack of innovation strategy. There is lack of strategy to promote alignments among groups in organization, clarify objectives and help to focus on them.

1. Specifying Objectives: First of all while creating innovation strategy it’s matter to specify our objectives and clear understand them.
   • To know how innovation will create value: because capability required is different for each, it’s important to choose value the innovation will create then stick to it.
   • Capturing a share of the value from innovation will generate: Companies should consider what could prevent customers from defecting to competitors, and how to keep strong position in ecosystem.
   • Choosing suited type innovation and allocation resources for them: divide their efforts between technological innovation and business model innovation. Choose best matched innovation type for their condition.
2. Prevention of individually allocating resources by Business units and functions: there is a possibility that business units will favor different projects.
3. Choosing best matched trade-off practice: each approach requires different potentials and works better some kinds of problem.

Solutions: Explicit innovation strategy created by senior management, and also which will promote alignment among groups in company, clarify objectives and priorities of projects will help create and sustain innovation capacity.

1. Process of developing productive innovation strategy should start from clear understanding of objectives, then dividing resources according each project need and rank.
2. The most senior leaders should orchestrate this process to overcome difficulties or irrational use of resources for projects that are different than main.
3. Approaching different Trade-off practices should depend on company’s capacity and problem trying to solve.

Conclusions: Company without innovation strategy won’t be able to make trade of decisions and choose all the elements of the innovation system. Innovation strategy is also must stay competitive as product itself. For sustaining innovation strategy’s competitiveness organization should invest to it continuously.