The Eight Essentials Of Innovation Article & Video: Mckinsey & Co (Essay Sample)

The 8 Essentials of Innovation Student Name Affiliation The Eight Essentials of Innovation Generally, innovation is the process of turning an idea into a good or service that adds value to a consumer. For well-established companies, this process is difficult as most tend to be better executors than innovators. However, some like NASA’s Ames Research Centre have been able to innovate their processes by diversifying themselves. Innovation requires that the company as a whole participate in encouraging the innovation process. It requires an integration of practices and processes across all company sections that encourage this process. As such, it is important to look at the various parts of innovation and how it has made many companies grow fast while others become extinct. Companies survive on their ability to come up with new ways of doing business. Moreover, these new ways must reduce expenses as well as improve service delivery in order for the company to realize good benefits. According to Jong, Marston, and Roth (2015), innovation is divided into two groups. The first group consists of elements that are strategic and creative in nature. They include aspire, choose, discover and evolve. The four components are geared towards encouraging creativity within an organization. This involves approaching innovation with the view that all people in a company are responsible for the advancement of innovation within it. Thus, from managers to lower level employees, every individual in a company should be encouraged to explore new and better ways of doing business. The second group consists of accelerate, scale, extend and mobilize. These components are geared towards powerful delivery. The authors insist that innovation in service delivery must involve other players outside the organization. The four components encourage innovative delivery that contributes to the overall performance of the organization. This then makes it imperative to explore the components and how they work to drive innovation. Innovation involves creativity and fast service delivery. From the first group, Aspire is given as the first component of innovation. It involves managers having a vision plan for the company. However, the vision should be realistic in nature so as to encourage people to act on it today. In a corporate setting, the most inspiring words are not sufficient regardless of how many times they are repeated. Thus, it is important to combine high-level visionary ideas with estimates of what value they will add to meet financial growth objectives. This helps to make the vision an explicit part of future plans. The second component, Choose, involves the specific selection of ideas that would drive the innovation agenda forward (Jong, Marston and Roth, 2015). Companies are bombarded with many new ideas from people within the organization. However, not all ideas can be executed or important to their future plans. Thus, it is imperative that managers sift through the many ideas and pinpoint those that will increase innovation while still being able to cut down on costs and improve service delivery. They should choose those projects that have the highest potential for success and back them up with enough resources to enable them to go forward. Discovery in innovation involves a systematic approach to a problem. Companies wishing to innovate would first methodically scrutinize a problem in that would need to be solved, find out what technology would enable them to come up with a solution, then come up with a business model that would help generate money from it. Studies have shown that most successful companies have come up with ways of combining these three elements. Discovering the struggles a consumer go through and providing them with a solution increase a company’s profitability and subsequent growth. Lastly, the fourth component in creative innovation is Evolve. Organizations need to change their business models constantly especially in this age of rapid technological advancement. Companies that are adamant about using old ways of doing business are fast becoming extinct as they are being replaced by fast-evolving upstarts in the industry. Most large companies wait until the last minute before changing their business models. As a result, many of them have lost business and closed shop. Amazon is a good example of a company that has been able to shift its business model so as to accommodate innovation. It involves its suppliers in its customer base by offering them a wide range of services such as warehouse management. One can only expect that such a company would continue to grow. On the other hand, delivery of innovation involves four components. First, Accelerate is the ability of a company to make decisions fast while still being able to innovate. Companies that exercise cautious governance inhibit innovation as sometimes innovative ideas must be executed as soon as they are discovered. Therefore, companies wishing to innovate their processes need a manager who is more flexible in his/her decision-making, ensuring that ideas are not stifled and that they are carried through from the time they are discovered to the time the product or service gets to the end user. Second, Scale provides that a company should be able to determine how far reaching they wish their products to be. For example, luxury goods are usually marketed for niche markets ((Jong, Marston and Roth, 2015). Others like social media are intended for a global scale. Determining the scale that a company wishes to target ensures that a company dedicates the right resources and time to a given idea so as to pursue it. It also ensures that new services or goods are delivered quickly in the required quantity and quality. The third component, Extend, involves partnering with other collaborators outside one’s organization. Talent and knowledge extend beyond the company and geographic boundaries. Therefore, it is no wonder that successful innovators access skills and talent...