Let’s innovate – EVERYDAY!
I was speaking to a colleague today and was talking about innovation and enterprise 2.0. “At a high level, one of the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 is constant innovation” I said. He looked confused straight away.
He asked “what do you mean by constant?”
“Well, on a daily basis.” I replied.
He couldn’t understand how innovation can happen on a daily basis (alrite, I might be exaggerating abit here) but I believe its achievable. He said that innovation requires approval to do things in a new way or just doing new things requires business plans, stakeholder analysis, Porter’s 5 forces analysis and the list goes on and on and on. He is right. Big innovation plans requires such forms of analysis. However, heaps of little innovation idea goes a long way too. For example, if a company’s word/powerpoint template has a page that is extremely ink “hungry” as the whole page is filled with the colour blue, for example. No one really notices how much ink it consumes, from the financial perspective, colour inks are expensive, from the environmental perspective, using too much ink is bad for the environment. If this can be picked up quickly just by ONE employee and this employee has a channel to express this idea (Enterprise 2.0 / collaboration platform) and the company takes a new approach to display the same information then the company immediately 1) save money, 2) save the earth.
The above example is also innovation, does it require business plans, stakeholder analysis and Porter’s 5 forces analysis. I believe not. But it has the same outcome, save money. Innovation can come in many kinds. As long as you can save money, increase revenue, improve morale and efficiency, then it meets its purpose. Lets take baby steps and make the world a better place and make your company a better place to be in. Let’s innovate everyday!
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