Innovation Requires the Right Foundation

Innovation is increasingly important in business. With global supply lines and competition just a few clicks away on Google, commoditization is a constant danger and profit margins rely on products and services that differentiate themselves from the competition.

This differentiation often requires innovation.

Yet innovation isn’t something that can usually be purchased off the shelf like a commodity; you can’t go online and buy a case of “innovation,” despite what consultants might tell you.

So how do you stay innovative, and create a unique culture in your business? Nextiva recently suggested four approaches in a blog post: looking differently from within your company, looking within your industry, looking in an unrelated industry, and discovering innovation from nature.

The key is getting the creative juices flowing and not seeing your business the same way you normally view it. There’s no one way to be creative, and no surefire approach that will definitely lead to innovation. But if there is an approach that has the greatest probability of driving innovative new products, services and even business processes, it is putting your thinking in a new place and letting ideas flow together.

As Nextiva noted, it is important to set the scene for innovation. That means exposure to different ways of looking at your business. This can come from seeing how the competition does things, which can in turn get you thinking outside of your own box. To a point, this can be useful. Apple has been particularly good at this, as one of the great innovative case studies of modern business.

But often the real breakthroughs come elsewhere, again as Apple illustrates. Steve Jobs, one of its much-missed founders, was notorious for bringing in references and ideas from other places. The Apple design focus, for instance, comes from his exposure to typography in college and his time with Zen Buddhism.

Image via Shutterstock

While you don’t need to be a Steve Jobs to drive innovation, this general approach also can be spectacularly useful; talk with the really creative people of the world, and often they will say that they take their cues from concepts in nature and from completely unrelated industries. You should do the same, making a viable business case for liberal arts thinking even when the bottom line is most important. It isn’t necessarily about being well-rounded or broad; it’s about ideas coming from different places that inspire you to innovate in your core business.

This highlights one of the most challenging but essential ways for driving innovation: having it come from within your business.

But how do you look at business differently from within? You do it with collaboration, by getting employees talking and sharing and working together.

Often there are different ideas and perspectives within even rigid organizations, and the trick is just unlocking those different perspectives by creating the space for employees to be creative and share freely.

This also takes a foundation: it takes virtualization.

These cross-pollinating conversations and collaboration used to occur by the water cooler and within an organization, but today we’re mobile and working with colleagues in different time zones and geographic locations. Virtualization is the key to reconnecting employees and creating the space for innovation.

This takes many forms, but the foundation is pretty universal: a company serious about innovation needs a virtual PBX to connect remote employees, it needs an online collaborative space for virtual sharing, and it needs a flexible mobility policy to allow employees to do their jobs no matter where they are or what the time. Nextiva, for its part, will be showcasing its own innovative virtualization solutions this week at ITEXPO in Miami, Fla., where it is a gold-level sponsor.

Innovation cannot be forced. But the stage can be set. Setting the stage for innovation requires virtual infrastructure such as a virtual PBX, and it requires pulling ideas from other places such as different industries and even Mother Nature.

Edited by Alisen Downey