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Written by Julia Kylliäinen | Dec 28, 2018
Strategy is about making choices between a number of feasible options to have the best chance at “winning”, and innovation is just one of the means to achieve your strategic goals. Without a good one, it’s actually quite difficult to achieve long-term success and orient your business for speed in order to secure competitive advantage. What’s interesting is that according to statistics, 96% of executives have defined innovation as a strategic priority. However, the lack of clear innovation strategy is a fundamental problem especially for established companies when optimization of existing business becomes a priority. While developing an innovation strategy isn’t necessarily difficult in itself, aligning it with your overall business goals and ways of working is what takes most of the time and effort. This time, we’ve decided to try to make sense of the broad topic by introducing five steps for developing your own innovation strategy. In addition, we’ll introduce a few tools that can be used when mapping your strategic goals in order to make the best choices for long-term success. What is Innovation Strategy?Innovation is about creating new value people are willing to use and pay for, whereas strategy is the plan for harnessing for example marketing, operations, finance and R&D to support achieving the competitive goal. To clarify, innovation strategy isn’t about innovation tactics, such as setting up an idea challenge, but more about mapping organization’s mission, vision and value proposition for defined customer markets. It sets boundaries to your innovation performance expectations by simplifying and structuring your innovation work to achieve the best possible outcome.
Before moving forward, it’s important to mention that your innovation goals shouldn’t be separated from your overall business objectives as having a unified vision and common goals for innovation will help fight the silo effect and increase your operational efficiency. If you think about marketing, for example, you wouldn’t want to separate your marketing strategy from your overall business objectives but rather make sure your marketing strategy and initiatives help contributing to your overall business plan and vision. The same goes for innovation. There’s no point of innovating just for the sake of it, as it has to contribute to your bigger plan. So, before starting to develop an innovation strategy, make sure you’re aware of how innovation helps you to achieve your goals.
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