Some Thoughts about Innovation

After learning the CBI, I really realised that innovation is a important way of running a business. However, there are some factors we should be cautious about the business innovation:

1. A successful innovation is good for the development of a company, but innovation is also a great risk as it means a lot of uncertainties.
2. The company should balance its resauces on innovation input, as its daily opeation should also be guaranteed.
3. A company should set up a team, specializing on the risk control of innovation to minimize the potential risk.
4. The innvation is needed, but too many innovations will make a company and market a mess. So a good innovation shoud be followed by a stable period in order to make it mature and accepted by the market and customers, and also for it heathy development.

I agree with you on 1,2 and 4. But I don't think it is necessary to set up a team specializing on the risk control of innovation. Special management team might affect the daily work of the other departments. Special employment on the specialists in the new team might induce the higher HR cost of the company. Maybe a part-time management committee could be set up and all the members could be chosen from other different main teams. These members are familiar with the customers and the company. They can contribute a lot to the innovation and risk management with lower HR cost effectively.

DanielLi@11GB wrote:After learning the CBI, I really realised that innovation is a important way of running a business. However, there are some factors we should be cautious about the business innovation:

1. A successful innovation is good for the development of a company, but innovation is also a great risk as it means a lot of uncertainties.
2. The company should balance its resauces on innovation input, as its daily opeation should also be guaranteed.
3. A company should set up a team, specializing on the risk control of innovation to minimize the potential risk.
4. The innvation is needed, but too many innovations will make a company and market a mess. So a good innovation shoud be followed by a stable period in order to make it mature and accepted by the market and customers, and also for it heathy development.

If you look at the innovation team of P&G, you can finf out a good idea to keep innovation is to have a independent team which can guide and train all levels and all department in a certain programme. Interestingly, Apple is somewhere similar. The top design and decision making team in Apple is actually far away from production and other department. A group of talent is leading the innovation and to implement it vertically top to bottom effectlvely. So, sometimes innovation should be a culture in an enterprise, while a key person(s) should decide the innovation implemented which can lead the company succeed.