Business
Six techniques business leaders can use to innovate
Global Banking & Finance Review®
Company
By Mark Wilson, CEO of Wilson Fletcher
Innovation will be key to future business growth after the pandemic, but it is something firms may have put on the back burner until now, says Mark Wilson, CEO at London-based business innovation company Wilson Fletcher, who outlines recommends six techniques for breakthrough innovation.
A recent survey of business leaders by HLB, the Global Advisory Accountancy and Network[i] says leaders are now compelled to switch from managing their response to the crisis to seeking new opportunities from the disruption, with 83% of respondents saying that more rapid and effective innovation is critical to future growth.
Wilson, whose firm helps leaders to future proof their business in the digital economy says, “Now that work life is settling down after the challenges of the pandemic, many organisations need to take a substantial step forward after treading water but are struggling to make it happen. The need to innovate has never been greater.
“Incremental innovation is everywhere, but the real step-change, breakthrough innovations are harder to come by. There’s no fixed formula for success, but there are six key techniques we use to generate big ideas which involve thinking about current problems or future opportunities in different ways.”
Wilson highlights the following six techniques businesses can use to innovate:
Wilson says that building on hidden assets is one of the most powerful ways to redefine a company’s future — once the right assets have been identified.
Sparks of insight are the gold nuggets that emerge from working with customers. It’s not the general trends or patterns, it’s the outliers; the single, aberrant points that fall way outside the line that is intended to show, by volume, where the most important data lies. Often the breakthrough idea had its origins in one single comment that one single person said.
Businesses need to engage people in the right conversation and listen to what they say with an opportunist’s ear, not a statisticians’ mindset. Breakthrough innovations need breakthrough ideas, and if the breakthroughs were found in the averages and median distributions, everyone would be having them.
Get stuff up on the wall and discuss it aloud, as a group. Some of the best ideas emerge during a ‘hearty’ debate or soon afterwards. They are more pub discussion than structured workshop and they can bring out passionately held views. They can be frustrating because the answer will not come. They can also be exciting when it does.
Wilson believes these techniques are instrumental in breakthrough thinking — partly because they are the perfect feeding ground for the earlier techniques, and partly because they seem to leave the same processes active in the brain long afterwards. So often ‘the idea’ emerges overnight, in the shower, in the bar later, while driving, or in many other scenarios where the brain has switched down a gear again.
Explore more articles in the Business category
