What can innovation mean for you?

The question “what is innovation” is raised at every expensive Innovation conference and in every Innovation book – but frankly, to most people and organisations that is completely irrelevant. What really matters is what it can mean for you. Examples of Innovation we’ve seen include:

• Tweaking internal processes so change can move faster through the organisation
• Generating “outside the box” ideas
• Coming up with new products
• Running projects in a different way
• Testing ideas rather than committing to large implementations

The point is that Innovation isn’t always big and shiny – it’s about solving a problem in a creative way.

One of the most successful innovation teams we’ve worked with had the strap line “Innovation with Purpose”. They based their team’s work backlog on the biggest problems the company was facing with the aim of coming up with meaningful, testable solutions to them. As a fact, it’s purpose that makes innovation meaningful. We were able to make significant improvements to problems that had historically been deemed as too big, too expensive, or too scary to fix.

One of our clients lost significant market share within their highstreets estate during covid and wanted an approach to rebound from the impact of this in an iterative, pilot lead way. To achieve this, we introduced a small, cross-functional innovation team that was given clear remit to rapidly test ideas that would reclaim customers from their competition. Rather than using traditional project delivery methods that would have taken months to achieve outcomes, our innovation team made numerous small changes over the course of weeks to significantly boost customer visits in key areas. This is yet another example of what innovation can mean for organisations.

A third example of non-shiny, but effective, innovation involved breaking down the tasks of our client’s operating model project into smaller, more achievable objectives. This enabled us to dramatically accelerate delivery allowing for visible progress and a shift towards a more collaborative culture. This approach differed to the original solution of bringing in a large team of consultants and ensured our client was able to retain ownership during the project whilst delivering it in a different way.

If you want to hear more about the model we used at Enfuse Group for all three of these examples, reach out to Anthony Collett via anthony.collett@enfusegroup.com.