What is Innovative Strategy and How Can it Help my Business
The business world is constantly changing and adapting, and for businesses to remain competitive in the business environment, you need to plan and know how to adapt to these changes.
For many businesses, this is where innovation comes in.
Companies use innovation to help meet the ever-changing needs of customers and build the latest ideas.
Innovation is the core of business development and how businesses and individuals foster innovative ideas. With it, companies can continue to grow in a dynamic business environment.
Innovation strategy is an approach for businesses to pursue new growth opportunities. It is a way for companies to have initiative with their growth strategies. Businesses need to keep up with the ever-changing business landscape.
What is Innovation Strategy
Innovation strategy in business is the process of making something new or improving something to serve the company and the customers better.
Innovation is a key strategy businesses use to help meet customers’ needs that they may not be currently meeting. It can improve the distribution of time and resources and build products or services in areas where products and services were once not needed. Innovation is also crucial in helping companies to become more efficient in their current processes.
Innovation strategy can best be described as a road map for businesses to meet a customer’s ever-changing needs better. It is how companies figure out the best way to keep up with customer needs and stay one step ahead of their competition. Businesses use this to meet the current unmet needs of consumers.
The Importance of Innovation Strategy
Innovation strategy is important for businesses to keep up with the competitive business landscape. Companies need to grow and adapt to the technological changes present worldwide. Having a clear innovation strategy that is effectively communicated across the company can help ensure that all levels of the organization are aligned.
Innovation strategy supplies a sharp vision for companies to ensure they have a bigger goal when setting smaller targets. With a clear innovation strategy with an associated vision, various parts of an organization can come together to ensure they work seamlessly to meet all customer needs.
Both the innovation strategies and the company vision must work hand in hand to ensure that the company is not being pulled in opposing directions.
Having an end goal that aligns with customer needs and innovation as a focus helps businesses achieve long-term success by keeping a competitive advantage in their industry.
A competitive advantage is key for businesses to stay ahead of the competition and grow in their industry. Long-term success is also achieved with an effective innovation strategy because it helps keep customers engaged over the long term.
Keeping customers engaged over an extended period ensures that they will look to your company first before looking to competitors and creates you as the industry benchmark for customers to come back to.
Types of innovation strategies
1. Routine
Routine strategy is used to add to a company’s established strategy, and it helps to cater to the existing customers by working to create new versions of companies existing product.
With a systematic innovation strategy, companies will look at existing products and check current customers for changes that may need to be made to products that could improve how they currently work.
For example, companies may investigate developing improvements for an existing product line to be released as a new upgraded version.
2. Disruptive
Disruptive innovation is when a company creates a new business model that will disrupt the current models of competitor companies.
Here a company is focused on the business model instead of a specific product they sell. When companies use disruptive innovation, they create a new level for the competitive playing field. It is a way for them to engage new customers and bring customers over from their competitors.
Disruptive innovation can be a way for companies to gain more new customers and sell more products than their competitors. For example, a company may look to offer free shipping in an industry where it is not the current standard, and that may drive consumers to shop with them instead of their competitors.
3. Radical
A radical innovation strategy is when a company implements a business model that is extremely or drastically different from its current model.
This could look like a drastic change for the company and its operations. The main aim behind radical innovation strategies is to replace the industry’s current standard and create something new.
A company may look to implement a radical innovation strategy when they see that what is currently happening in the industry is not working for consumers and requires a major change.
A radical innovation strategy can set a stage for what other companies look to follow in an industry.
4. Architectural
Architectural innovation strategy is a combination of both modern technology and a change in the business model.
With this strategy, companies look at two primary focuses, the innovation behind creating new products using updated technology and creating a business strategy to help grow.
Architectural innovation strategy can be one of the most challenging types of innovation strategies for a company to implement as it requires the company to put innovative technology in place while following a new business model. It can also be a more time-consuming innovation strategy for businesses to implement.
How To Develop An Innovation Strategy
Developing an innovation strategy requires time and commitment from all levels of personnel within the company. It will also require members from all company levels to work together.
The process may be long and require many steps and focus from many different business areas.
The first step in developing an effective innovation strategy is aligning your innovation with a current business strategy.
The alignment between the innovation and the business strategy ensures that the strategy that will be implemented will be successful in helping to build and foster new growth for the company.
Aligning innovation with the current business strategy also helps individuals across the organization understand corporate goals in the short-term and long-term.
This will include understanding the market that the business is currently in and the market it plans to work in since the best innovation responds to the needs of customers and potential customers.
Innovation strategy must also understand the competitive business landscape to ease into new markets and build current strategies not used by competitors.
Determine Your Value Proposition
A company’s innovation strategy must answer the question, understand the unique value the company will bring to the market, and know the type of innovation that will allow the company to take hold of that value and build a competitive advantage.
To understand and answer these questions, a company must first understand its own core capabilities.
A company’s core capabilities will be the things that the company was built around, and when understanding what kind of value you can bring to your customers, it is important to understand what is already built within your company to fulfill those value-adding tasks.
Being able to use the skills and values already present in the company allows for a more seamless transition to a new strategy.
Leave The Unmet Needs To The Customers
To produce a successful innovation strategy, a company will meet customers’ needs before they even realize those needs are unmet.
Employees are often a part of a company’s customer base and can be vital in uncovering those unmet needs.
Utilizing employees to evaluate products and services before they become available to the public is a way to see how customers will respond to changes.
Companies can consider crowdsourcing ideas on things that may be missing a company’s current product or service offering or may be able to supply input on how they can enhance products and services to meet unmet customer needs better.
Reaching out for information on how a company can improve is also a way for the company to interact with customers.
Assess And Adjust
For a company to have good strategy plans, it must be flexible when implementing plans.
Not every step of the process will work out exactly as planned. Companies need to be flexible and ready to adapt to changes as they arise.
Flexibility also allows companies to continually adapt the ideas that they are working on based on what customers need or what innovative technologies are out there.
The ability to assess the current situations that the company faces will allow for innovative strategies to be built around issues as they arise.
Adaptability also ensures that the company can find what satisfies customer needs when not met, giving the company an upper hand in the market.
It also helps the company see if what they have been implementing in the past has been effective and how you can work to improve that.
Many governments may supply support for firms looking to innovate and build innovative ideas, as it can help foster economic growth.
For example, the Canadian government has a Research and Development Refund Program (SRED) that aims to help companies that take on research and development for products within Canada get some of that money back. The SRED program helps the Canadian government promote economic growth within Canada while also supporting firms to create new and innovative products so they can adjust to the changing times.
Takeaways
Innovation is all around, and keeping up with it requires a good strategy. Developing that strategy can take a lot of time and money from the firm, which might make them hesitant to start.
Innovation strategy is implemented in many ways and can even be done without the realization that you are specifically working on innovative strategies.
Companies that are involved with innovative strategic efforts are rewarded with customer loyalty and business growth. Overall, companies will look to implement innovative strategies to help bring themselves ahead of the curve and stay on top of upcoming technological trends.
Author’s Bio:
Shelly Solis is one of the women behind SaaSLaunchr, a marketing agency specializing in blog outreach services and SaaS SEO. Catch her thoughts on digital marketing, technology, and business at the SaaSLaunchr – SaaS Marketing blog!
Mahesh Kumar is a dynamic marketing consultant and tech enthusiast with a passion for driving business growth through his innovative strategies and cutting-edge technology. With 6 years of experience in the industry, he has helped numerous businesses leverage the power of digital marketing to reach their target audience, build brand awareness, and increase sales.
