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Innovation Basics

Innovation is one of the hottest business buzzwords, but few understand innovation basics.

Innovate is derived from the Latin innovare: to make new. That said, making something new isn’t necessarily an innovation.

Repeat: Making something new isn’t necessarily an innovation.

In fact, many confuse invention with innovation. Wrong. Invention is not innovation.

Unless the “innovator” has improved the lives of customers, according to those customers, the new offering is not an innovation. Without a formalized means of assessing customer satisfaction (excluding bogus social media), innovation is impossible.

NOTE: This axiom applies, regardless of company size, to every industry and every customer category: military, industrial, scientific, commercial, financial, consumer, etc. Violate it at your peril.

The Dilbert strip below illustrates this point perfectly.

The Branding-Innovation Cycle

When innovating, the fundamental question becomes: What new/tweaked offering should we produce, for whom, and why?

Your brand — the emotional connection customers have with your company, that which provides your company purpose and direction — answers this question. I explain this in more detail in Intrabranding: The Keystone of Corporate Agility.

Intrabranding is the process of selling the corporate brand internally. If employees don’t know, accept, and execute this brand, they cannot innovate — and, the brand will fail externally.

Without knowing what your customers want and need, and how they feel about your company — and lacking the concomitant purpose and direction that a strong brand confers — you can neither hatch nor improve an offering (product or service) with success.

Moreover, even if you have crafted a strong brand, innovation demands execution.

The inability to marshal and coordinate the requisite internal and external resources — from marketing to sales to finance to engineering to manufacturing — will stymie, and possibly nullify, your innovative efforts.

Furthermore, if your product or service is a unique standout, it may be beneficial to patent and/or trademark it. Tread carefully here, because not all products are worthy of patenting or trademarking.

Finally, you must be able to verify that your company’s innovation is, in fact, an innovation: it improves the personal or business lives of your customers, according to them.

These steps are depicted below in a five-step, continuous branding-innovation cycle.