I N N O V AT I O N
22 ¡ MONEY
ISSUE 54
Sarah is a public relations consultant and magazine editor who spends too much time looking up recipes. An avid reader and summer worshipper, Sarah survives the winter months by escaping to Gozo as often as she can.
When the power within an organisation is wielded intelligently, innovation flourishes, often leading to ground-breaking ideas and positive change. Sarah Kennard discovers which techniques to implement for a more innovative approach in your business. Innovation is the creative process, application and successful exploitation of an idea and is vital to the success of any business. So, while no idea is necessarily an original one, how it is manipulated to suit your business, can be. If Apple Corp. had not innovated, there would be no iPhones and without an innovative approach, Microsoft would never have given the world Windows operating systems. Even going further back in time, if manufacturers had stopped innovating, we would all still be driving Model Ts and calling each other on brick phones that need operator assistance. Often just one innovative and revolutionary idea can turn an industry on its head; think AirBnB which has disrupted and reinvented the hospitality industry or Uber which is reinventing the road transport. But it is usually the combination of the little things that a business
owner or CEO does, or stops doing, that brings about its ability to truly be innovative. Through research for this article, it became quite obvious that what sets the superstars of innovation apart is not just creativity and brilliant ideas. While Nikola Tesla, the Serbian engineering genius, may have been more brilliant than Thomas Edison, it was Edison who had huge successes that changed the world, while Tesla died penniless. What Edison, along with many current success stories seems to have had in more abundance, is a combination of strengths from powerful connections with other leaders and a healthy network, skills needed to lead and, perhaps most important, an ever-growing record of making big new things happen. So how can you be more innovative when it
comes to your business? Here are some of the techniques adopted by some of the most successful businesses. It starts at the top A good CEO or manager knows that to sustain meaningful success and growth, forwardthinking and innovative processes and policies need to be introduced and implemented. In other words, look at the big picture not just
