What are the core components that drive a business? If you ask this question to different entrepreneurs and leaders, you’ll get a wide range of answers from agility and adaptability to collaboration and rapid action. But one common thread that you will find across just about all the answers is innovation. Innovation has progressed from being ignored to being a minor goal to being the key focus for many businesses in today’s ever-changing highly competitive world. Here are five reasons why ignoring innovation in your business is a massive liability:
1. It’s The Age of Disruption
Disruption is more than just a buzzword — it’s the reality of today’s business landscape. Now more than ever it’s undeniably true that the world you wake up in could be radically different from the world that you knew when you went to sleep. A new technology could irrevocably shake up multitudes of businesses overnight. A cryptocurrency incident could send shockwaves through the economy in seconds. And a global pandemic could just about turn the entire world on its head in a heartbeat. You need to be ready to innovate anywhere and everywhere, because you never know what’s coming next.
2. There Is No Stability
Just about now, you may be thinking, I don’t need all of this new-fangled innovation stuff. I don’t need to keep fighting to get to the top. I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing and be happy where I’m at. But here’s the deal. You can’t stay where you’re at. What you think is solid ground under your feet is actually quicksand. Because of the cutthroat competition and disruption going on in just about every field at every level, you can’t afford to stagnate or you’ll be done. There is only moving up or moving down, and you need to pick which one you want in your future.
3. It’s Integral to Problem Solving
With a new age come new problems, and with new problems we are inevitably forced to find new ways to solve them since the old ones don’t work anymore. This is where innovation really shows its true power, because implementing a robust innovation management system in your organization will help you solve problems more effectively than ever before at a pace that you didn’t even know was possible. Innovation management platforms are designed from the ground up for this very type of thing, and they can help you in unbelievable ways.
4. It Isn’t Going Anywhere
If you feel like innovation is just some kind of new fad that will eventually be replaced by something else and so you don’t need to go to all the trouble of learning and implementing it in your business, think again. Innovation isn’t a storm you can wait out. In fact, it isn’t a storm at all. The new challenges and threats facing us in these unprecedented times are the storm, and innovation is the tool that will help us not just weather the storms, but use them to help us build back better and stronger than ever before. Innovation is here to stay, so roll out that welcome mat for it sooner rather than later.
Steve Jobs had a great quote about leaders who are bold and who innovate freely, “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes…the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo…you can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things…they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.” This message holds true now more than ever. Don’t ignore innovation, and nobody be able to ignore you! Innovation is not a force to be reckoned with, but a force to be mastered so that you can wield it and use it to its full potential!