Innovation can help businesses meet several key goals, including boosting profits, creating innovative products and services, as well as creating a distinctive customer appeal. It also helps companies keep their competitive edge in a rapid-moving marketplace with more and more industries being disrupted by technological advances.
Business innovations can take many forms, including the creation of new products and services, improving processes, launching marketing campaigns, and changing the culture of a company. They may also involve changes to existing products or services, for example, adding features or upgrading customer service. The most successful innovations are those that are both novel and useful.
Innovative ideas are rarely the sole catalyst to innovation if they do not produce viable solutions to real-world problems. An idea that is innovative must be beneficial to both the business as well as its customers to be considered an innovative idea. A business idea is considered successful if it is new and valuable.
A successful business innovation will not just bring new value to the organization, but as well as improve decision-making, solving problems and communication within the organization. Businesses should constantly monitor trends in the market to identify business opportunities for innovation.
The best source of ingenuous ideas is usually outside of the industry within which a company operates. IBM for instance, was an innovator when it created the modern accounting system after realizing that banks in 1933 would not buy new machines due to the fact that they didn’t have enough cash.
The introduction of scleral lenses to eye surgery is another instance of business innovation. Doctors had been using an enzyme to remove cataracts for more than 50 years, but Alcon made it more profitable when they added the preservative. This was an innovative approach to business that led to the creation of a new product and a worldwide monopoly.