In the recent blog post for the Harvard Business Review, Tim Kastelle wrote about how companies often incorrectly react to business challenges. In his post, “Is Your Innovation Problem Really a Strategy Problem?” Kastelle argues that the problem companies are trying to solve isn’t always the real problem.
Is a lack of innovation your real problem?
When faced with increasing competition or declining sales, businesses frequently assume that innovation is the solution. So they put more energy and resources towards coming up with lots of new ideas.
Yet, according to Kastelle, most large firms are actually strong at generating ideas. Where companies fall down is in selecting the best ideas and implementing them.
So a company’s declining fortunes may, in fact, point to a larger issue. He suggests that the real problem isn’t too little innovation, but rather, a bad business strategy.
Devising a better business strategy.
To find the best business strategy for a company, Kastelle lays out three key points to consider:
- Avoid top-down strategy making. Don’t let one group create the strategy and expect another group to implement it — expand the number of people creating the strategy to avoid execution problems.
- Involve more people in strategy development. Innovation works best when everyone in the firm is involved with creating and executing the ideas.
- Don’t assume the obvious problem is the real one. Change the way you develop your strategy to get different innovation outcomes.
These are all great points, and they’re all things that an Enterprise Social Platform can help you execute.
How tibbr helps with strategy.
Using tibbr, you can avoid top-down strategies by opening up the process to anyone or everyone — easily loop in colleagues at any level, department, or geographic location.
Letting more employees (outside of management) weigh in with concerns or improvements to the strategy during development gives them a sense of ownership and ensures a better execution.
Often, management is too close to the subject to be objective about it. By putting new minds on strategy development, you’ll get different insights, knowledge, experience, expertise, and opinions — all critical elements to coming up with the best possible strategy for your company.
Discover and execute the best ideas.
Having the right business strategy is important, but so is innovation. And tibbr helps you find innovation in unexpected places. Using the new tibbr Ideas app, you can not only “crowd-source” innovation, but easily manage and implement the best ideas (as up-voted by your colleagues) so you choose and implement the best ideas.
So if you want to make your company more innovative, check out tibbr. Nothing fosters communication, collaboration, and innovation better than an Enterprise Social Network like tibbr. If you want to experience all the benefits of tibbr first-hand, sign up for a free trial here.
