E26: Innovation readiness is a critical issue for any organization

It's easy to think of innovation as something that happens only in the lab or in small start-ups. Yet innovation is a key component of every business strategy. In fact, the term “innovation” itself derives from the Latin word meaning “to find again.” Companies need to continually reinvent themselves to remain competitive. They do this by developing new products, services, and ways of doing things. Companies need an innovation strategy because innovation is a complex undertaking. In addition to the usual suspects—technology, people, and capital—innovations depend on a host of other factors, including organizational structure, culture, and the nature of competition. Most important, however, is the innovation system itself: the set of interrelated activities, structures, and processes that govern how a company goes about searching for novel problems and solutions. In this episode, we have guest Michael Haynes, B2B Customer Strategy Consultant & Business Growth Strategy Planning at Listen Innovate Grow. Michael Haynes talks about that there are 5 elements of business innovation: product, services, organizational structure, process, and your marketing strategy and to succeed you need to be in alignment with your customer market and B2B buyer needs. He also talks about that doing the upfront work really sets the framework for how you move forward and the lack of not doing enough of that that leads to miss opportunities or creating products that people don't want. "We need to fail to a degree so that we can learn so we know how to move forward, how to be innovative and competitive" Michael Haynes.