Successful organizations, world-wide, realize how important it is to their success to nourish creativity and innovation. Innovation is after all, the vanguard to increased competitiveness. Yes, competitiveness, that all important factor, for companies to be able to weather storms like current economy, globalization as well as rapidly evolving and disruptive technologies. My years of experience in the development of innovative electronic products, innovation challenges have necessitated the gathering and practice of techniques from many arenas.
Here are a few ideas that we have developed in my company. I hope you enjoy the following suggestions, and that they help expand and enable innovation in your organization, too.
Environment for Innovation
To build an environment good for innovation there must be an organizational climate that encourages, supports and rewards innovative effort. Executives must say and show, through incentives, rewards and recognition that the organization needs and will listen to the ideas of every one of its people.
Add Urgency
Capturing markets is urgent for companies – pass it on. Adding a sense of urgency to and making innovation a key to the company’s security and growth can generate great new ideas.
Embrace the Obstacles.
It could mean your ideas aren’t yet groundbreaking enough to invigorate the organization, let alone capture a market if there is nothing in the way of a new idea. Keep pushing; it is frequently a new approach to major obstacles that ends up resulting in real innovation.
Create Your Own Evaluation Tools.
Create simple tools such as a list of 10 questions of factors to vet your innovations. Have everyone one on the team participate. This lets everyone get in on the action and have buy-in while keeping evaluation costs down. Chances are you’re making the evaluation process too easy if more than 1 or 2 out of 20 ideas make it through the gamut.








