I joined Blog Rush

*** We highly recommend you make a blog post on your blog to tell others how you have joined BlogRush — and make sure to link to BlogRush using your direct link so you will be credited if anyone signs up from following your links!

www.blogrush.com  

OK here goes lets see if I get more hits from blog rush….

  src=”http://widget.blogrush.com/show.js” mce_src=”http://widget.blogrush.com/show.js”>

Part 3 – The Innovation Process at Unique World – Creating a Culture of Innovation at Unique World

Creating and encouraging an environment where people feel that new ideas are welcome and wanted is crucial to Unique World’s innovation process. We know that Innovation thrives in a culture that is not afraid of taking risks, promotes experimentation and rewards off the wall thinking.

In order to have innovation accepted throughout Unique World we have tried to encourage everyone to take part in it. We also acknowledge that it needs to be a continual process that is itself tweaked and reviewed at regular intervals.

At Unique World we have not limited the innovation process to only be looking at opportunities that we can take to market. But the process is also free to drive improvements in core business processes or to suggest way to make us do something differently (and hopefully better). A great resource I stumbled across recently was the innovation check list written by Joanne Pimlott, Founding Director of the Education Centre for Innovation and Commercialisation and Academic Director of the Master of Entrepreneurship at The University of Adelaide. Innovation checklist: making innovation affordable and do-able

• Do you take time to identify training needs for current and future needs?
• What publications, people, events and so on do you need to access?
• What incentives will you provide for people to undertake training to maintain and update their knowledge and skills?
• Are ideas and suggestions actively sought by management? What happens to those ideas and suggestions? (Follow up is essential)
• What motivates your people to be creative, experimental (where appropriate) and innovative in their thinking?
• Do you understand what motivates each individual in your business? (What assumptions do you make in this area?)
• Is innovation likely to occur because of or in spite of your business culture, structure and management style?
• How readily do people in your workplace accept change?
• Does your business have a risk management strategy?

Joanne Pimlott

It is certainly my view that virtually any SME should be able to follow Joanne’s simple checklist and start to implement simple and affordable innovation programs quite quickly. Certainly the Unique World experence so far is that it can really change the way you think and run your business.

Part 2 – The innovation Process at Unique World – Innovation Leadership

Innovation requires strong leadership. If you do not want innovation to be haphazard, then you need to make the strategic decision to manage for innovation.

Managing for innovation requires strategic decisions about where to focus attention and time. While large businesses have the resources for formal strategic management, many small to medium business do not.

Even at Unique World, we have fallen into the trap of feeling we are too busy meeting the day-to-day challenges of operating the current core business to spend time developing and nourishing innovation. But we know that innovation is one of the corner stone’s of Unique World’s future and will have a profound impact on Unique World today and tomorrow.

In order for innovation to be effective it must be encouraged, innovation is often all about leading by example. Luckily Unique World’s CEO Eddie Geller has take an interest in day-to-day innovation activities since day one of starting Unique World, and the formalisation of an Innovation process is just another stage in the maturity of the business that he and Elon Aizenstros started over eight years ago.

In thinking about leadership in the innovation sphere I am often, draw to the writings of Peter Drucker ‘the expert’ in innovation processes and thinking in my view:

Drucker says in Innovation and Entrepreneurship (1993):

•  An innovation, to be effective, has to be simple and it has to be focused. It should only do one thing, otherwise it can confuse your staff, customers and suppliers.
•  Effective innovations start small. They are not grandiose. They try to do one specific thing.
•  A successful innovation aims at market and business leadership. It does not aim necessarily at becoming eventually a ‘big business’; in fact, no one can foretell whether a given innovation will end up as a big business or modest achievement. But if an innovation does not aim at leadership from the beginning, it is unlikely to be innovative enough, and therefore unlikely to be capable of establishing itself.

The third and finial part of this entry along soon …