Innovation Management: Key to Exponential Growth and Scaling – Ayobola Adedayo

In today’s competitive business environment, innovation management has become a critical aspect for organizations looking to grow and scale.
It is impossible to sustain growth without staying innovative and ensuring a solid innovation management strategy. The question then becomes, how can leaders create an organizational culture and infrastructure that facilitates innovation? How do companies spot opportunities for innovation? Do they need dedicated roles for innovation management?

Innovation management is key to organizations because it provides an avenue to continuously learn and improve customer needs. It allows a business to scale faster by building lean versions for quick innovative solutions. Innovation management uses creativity to improve on ideas, processes or products by continuously learning, improving, and testing to satisfy the customer and constantly rethink how to operate to keep creating as much value as possible.

Research shows that over 70% of innovation projects fail due to poor execution. One reason for failure is the lack of inclusiveness in the vision and strategy for innovation. Innovation management ideas need to be inclusive of the rest of the organization for better ownership across the board.

Additionally, a lack of innovation as a criterion in performance review can stifle creativity and innovation. Innovation needs to be part of the performance review process to ignite that innovative culture in your company.

By acknowledging and rewarding innovation, dedicating time and resources to innovation, and integrating it into employees’ roles, organizations can create a culture of innovation. Companies can spot opportunities for innovation by observing customers, monitoring trends, and enabling customer immersion. Furthermore, design thinking can support innovation management by providing a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.

To improve on innovation, organizations can spend time shadowing the customers and businesses they have supported, hold Action After Review (AAR) meetings after every event to enable continuous learning, and run conjoint analysis on their platforms to learn and improve on the digital platform. Airbnb is an excellent example of a company that created an experience service from observing the Airbnb hosts and institutionalized this into a feature on the platform.

Another important aspect of innovation management is service design. Services create customer experience, and service
In conclusion, innovation management should be an integral part of a company’s strategy as it helps to promote technological and institutional innovation.

Innovation management is a continuous process and should be done continuously using principles such as design thinking, platforming, service development, and others. A lack of knowledge of innovation management is almost always detrimental in a competitive environment.

Organisations need to continuously improve on processes, people, leadership for appropriate innovation management. Lastly, Innovation, although not sufficient alone, is a necessary prerequisite for the continued survival and development of enterprises.