Sajin Nair asked:
Most entrepreneurs spend 16-18 hours working on their laptops, taking calls and spending lot of hours with different department heads to improve the business results. They spend lot of hours in improving their processes in the hope that one day they would be able to improve their productivity and satisfy their customers. Hoping they would soon become a market leader.
I feel sorry for Department Heads who spend long hours again with their team members to tell them why they need a process and how it would help them to achieve their objectives. But Entrepreneurs hardly realize that what makes a difference is Innovation.
Exactly, Eye En En Vee Oo Tee Eye Oo En, Innovation. What is Innovation? Just finding a new way to do things? Getting more and patents? Investing more and more in R & D without any objective? No absolutely not. These are different activities in the process of Innovation.
So what exactly is Innovation? Innovation is definitely not introducing something new but introducing something which would take the business one step further. What I mean to say is that anything new that gets introduced is not Innovation. Its just a part of the process of achieving Innovation. Innovation is only achieved when it directly adds value to the businesses not trial and error method though that’s one of the most important aspects of the process of achieving innovation.
What exactly should businesses do? Businesses should employ processes defined very clearly with respect to objectives and goals. This should be a very small team of qualified professionals who can think out of box and are not influenced by existing processes, culture or anything for that matter. This team should be very fresh with ideas under the guidance of one dedicated expert who can lead them successfully.
Once you have a set up something like this then you can have these people working on one aspect of your business and ask them to come up with different strategies. The leader needs to understand that this would only be an idea and he actually needs to take care of implementation and marketing strategies within the organization. The reason why he should be responsible is because no one else in the organization should have understood the existing culture better than him and he can subtly implement it without many objections.
These strategies should have the power of improving the business, make positive impacts on the customer and strongly differentiates you from your competitors. When you very clearly see the changes in the lives of people, customers or vendors then you can say we are innovative unless then you are just in process of achieving innovation.