Innovation | What It Is? Importance And Benefits For Your Company

What Is Innovation

Innovation is a process that modifies existing elements, ideas or protocols, improving them or creating new ones that have a favorable impact on the market.

Innovation is a concept closely linked to the business world. To innovate is to improve what exists, providing new options that meet the needs of consumers or even creating new products so that they are successful in the market.

Through knowledge of the products, the market, the value contribution of the company, and the needs of consumers, a series of changes and criteria can be established to innovate in them that are useful in the market.

Importance Of Innovation

Standing still means regression in a constantly changing and continuously evolving society like the one we find ourselves in. If the panorama changes and we continue to do the same, it is most likely that our company will be doomed to failure and extinction. In this sense, innovating has become a necessity, becoming considered the actual engine of the company.

IBM published a study (The Global CEO Study) carried out on more than 1,500 CEOs of companies and public administrations in more than sixty nations and 33 industries to determine what was the most critical leadership skill for their business, being creative, in close relationship and interdependence with innovation, the most used and voted.

This study also cited that creative managers were 81% more likely than others to value innovation as a critical business capability.

Innovation Benefits

Innovation is a determining capacity for companies because it has become their most important engine of transformation and growth. This is reflected in the multiple benefits it brings to the company:

• Increase profit/margins.

• Diversify the product.

• Differentiate the product.

• It offers the possibility of greater satisfaction with customer needs.

• Achieve better consumer loyalty.

• It allows the maintenance or increase of the market share.

• Secures a strategic position in the market.

• Facilitates the use of new business opportunities.

• It will enable the development of markets.

• It offers personalized services to consumers.

• Increase competitive advantage.

The innovation must contain two fundamental properties:

• That innovative ideas are appropriate to the context.

• These ideas are successfully implemented, so they add value with respect to the above.

Based on the advantages it implies, innovation is creativity successfully implemented in such a way that it produces added value.

Areas Where Innovation Can Be Applied

Product Development

In this case, innovation aims to improve existing products—for example, manufacturing products with packaging that enhances their durability.

Improvement And Automation of Processes

The innovation ensures that processes work better and more autonomously to streamline business activity and that people can devote their efforts to more practical tasks.

Marketing

Innovation is essential in all marketing and advertising processes since marketing strategies, techniques, and tools have to be renewed and updated with particular frequency due to market changes. Specifically, innovation is mainly present in digital marketing, in disciplines such as SEO, web design or social media management.

Digital Transformation

It is the transformation of the organization’s culture incorporating technology in all its areas. Digital transformation implies that all the people who are part of the organization adopt a series of values ​​and take innovation as an essential aspect of their daily lives.

Development of new technologies or technological applications

Suppose you can innovate in the social, commercial, and organizational aspects. In that case, you can also mention the fact of doing it in the technological part through the use of product manufacturing techniques, machinery or tools that add value to the product and obtain novel results. For example: using artificial intelligence to develop and improve existing products.

Organizational Transformation

Innovation can not only respond to improving or creating a product that revolutionizes the market but can also be applied to the company’s organisation. This can be done from the point of view of planning the organization itself, tasks, internal and external relations, etc.

The organizational transformation also consists of applying mechanisms and a work base that includes innovation in its implementation. For example: include new business management support software, new forms of contact with customers through applications, personalized emails, an efficient digital communication system for managers, etc.

Difference Between Creativity and Innovation

Both concepts are often confused, but the truth is that creativity and innovation are two different sides of the same coin. Creativity precedes innovation, a human capacity, and a means to achieve an end.

On the other hand, innovation is all those systems or methods that allow progress in specific disciplines. Innovation is both a means and an end. But it differs from creativity because it is generally a more analytical, organized, and fact-based process.