I use this video with business people as well as in my talks to elementary school students! You may enjoy this explainer video by Steven Johnson :. Different studies have confirmed that businesses want to be more innovative. In my book, Skip a Step : Imparting Wisdom for Young Entrepreneur Minds , all the interviews I conducted led to innovation, creativity and vision being important to business success!

The different types of innovation that you are likely to run across include product, process, supply chain and marketing. Here are 7 reasons that businesses should incorporate to remain innovative. Creative Development — Qualities of innovative nature are essential for new businesses today. You can achieve growth by learning how to be creative. You need to learn this business skill to help make things of value from your creativeness. When you have this business skill you will find that it opens up all kinds of opportunities and gives you the potential for a new market and helps you to keep up with the current trends.

Continuous Improvement — Innovation gives organizational sustainability when you are making continual improvements and repackaging and re-branding. Any good manager will recognize the need to innovate and grows the business skills to increase their creativity. Reinforce Your Brand — Development branding is popular in organizational leadership. This process reveals information to help leaders to learn other ways to be more innovative. It is important because it is recognized as one of the main drivers for success.

It gives organizational sustainability such as brand maintenance. Making the Most of What You Have Already — It is not all about creating a new product or service which you can sell, but you also need to focus on your existing business procedures to improve your efficiency, find some new customers, increase your profits and cut down on the amount of your waste.

When you are continually innovating and improving on the practices of your business you will likely also attract better staff and keep more of your existing staff. For companies such as Kodak and Polaroid, entering the digital world meant mastering completely new competences in solid-state electronics, camera design, software, and display technology.

As one might imagine, architectural innovations are the most challenging for incumbents to pursue. In much of the writing on innovation today, radical, disruptive, and architectural innovations are viewed as the keys to growth, and routine innovation is denigrated as myopic at best and suicidal at worst.

That line of thinking is simplistic. In fact, the vast majority of profits are created through routine innovation. Microsoft is often criticized for milking its existing technologies rather than introducing true disruptions.

The point here is not that companies should focus solely on routine innovation. Rather, it is that there is not one preferred type. In fact, as the examples above suggest, different kinds of innovation can become complements, rather than substitutes, over time. Intel, Microsoft, and Apple would not have had the opportunity to garner massive profits from routine innovations had they not laid the foundations with various breakthroughs.

Conversely, a company that introduces a disruptive innovation and cannot follow up with a stream of improvements will not hold new entrants at bay for long. Businesses in markets where the core technology is evolving rapidly like pharmaceuticals, media, and communications will have to be much more keenly oriented toward radical technological innovation—both its opportunities and its threats.

A company whose core business is maturing may have to seek opportunities through business model innovations and radical technological breakthroughs. But a company whose platforms are growing rapidly would certainly want to focus most of its resources on building and extending them.

In thinking strategically about the four types of innovation, then, the question is one of balance and mix. Google is certainly experiencing rapid growth through routine innovations in its advertising business, but it is also exploring opportunities for radical and architectural innovations, such as a driverless car, at its Google X facility.

Apple is not resting on its iPhone laurels as it explores wearable devices and payment systems. Without an explicit strategy indicating otherwise, a number of organizational forces will tend to drive innovation toward the home field. Some years ago I worked with a contact lens company whose leaders decided that it needed to focus less on routine innovations, such as adding color tints and modifying lens design, and be more aggressive in pursuing new materials that could dramatically improve visual acuity and comfort.

After a few years, however, little progress had been made. Despite a strategic intent to venture into new territory, the company was trapped on its home field. The root of the problem was that business units and functions had continued to make resource allocation decisions, and each favored the projects it saw as the most pressing.

Only after senior management created explicit targets for different types of innovations—and allocated a specific percentage of resources to radical innovation projects—did the firm begin to make progress in developing new offerings that supported its long-term strategy. As this company found, innovation strategy matters most when an organization needs to change its prevailing patterns.

It also helps you navigate the inherent trade-offs. Consider one popular practice: crowdsourcing. The idea is that rather than relying on a few experts perhaps your own employees to solve specific innovation problems, you open up the process to anyone the crowd. One common example is when an organization posts a problem on a web platform like InnoCentive and invites solutions, perhaps offering a financial prize.

Another example is open source software projects, in which volunteers contribute to developing a product or a system think of Linux. Crowdsourcing has a lot of merits: By inviting a vast number of people, most of whom you probably could not have found on your own, to address your challenges, you increase the probability of developing a novel solution.

Research by my Harvard Business School colleague Karim Lakhani and his collaborator Kevin Boudreau, of the London Business School, provides strong evidence that crowdsourcing can lead to faster, more-efficient, and more-creative problem solving.

But crowdsourcing works better for some kinds of problems than for others. For instance, it requires fast and efficient ways to test a large number of potential solutions. If testing is very time-consuming and costly, you need some other approach, such as soliciting a handful of solutions from just a few experts or organizations.

Similarly, crowdsourcing tends to work best for highly modular systems, in which different problem solvers can focus on specific components without worrying about others.

Crowdsourcing is not universally good or bad. It is simply a tool whose strength exploiting large numbers of diverse problem solvers is a benefit in some contexts highly diffused knowledge base, relatively inexpensive ways to test proposed solutions, modular system but not in others concentrated knowledge base, expensive testing, system with integral architectures. Another practice subject to trade-offs is customer involvement in the innovation process.

But others say that working too closely with customers will blind you to opportunities for truly disruptive innovation. Steve Jobs was adamant that customers do not always know what they want—the reason he cited for eschewing market research.

Choosing a side in this debate requires the cold calculus of strategy. In addition, close collaboration enables Corning and its customers to mutually adapt the component and the system.

This is critical when subtle changes in the component technology can affect the system, and vice versa. Crowdsourcing, like other innovation practices, involves trade-offs.

A supply-push approach—developing technology and then finding or creating a market—can be more suitable when an identifiable market does not yet exist. A good example is the integrated circuit, invented in the late s by Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor. Both came up with the idea of putting multiple transistors on a chip as a way to solve a reliability problem, not to spawn smaller computers.

In fact, with the exception of the military, there was little demand for integrated circuits. Producers of computers, electronics equipment, and telecommunications systems preferred discrete transistors, which were cheaper and less risky.

To help create demand, Texas Instruments invented and commercialized another device: the handheld calculator. They believe that given the long lead times of drug development and the complexities of the market, accurate forecasts are impossible.

Again, the choice between a demand-pull and a supply-push approach involves weighing the trade-offs. If you choose the former, you risk missing out on technologies for which markets have not yet emerged.

If you choose the latter, you may create technologies that never find a market. Similar trade-offs are inherent in choices about innovation processes.

Advocates argue that those models inject a degree of predictability and discipline into what can be a messy endeavor. Opponents counter that they destroy creativity. Who is right? Both are—but for different kinds of projects. Highly structured phase-gate processes, which tend to focus on resolving as much technical and market uncertainty as possible early on, work well for innovations involving a known technology for a known market.

Customer needs are constantly changing. One day, your customers might need exactly what you have to offer, and the next day, they might need something else. Innovators predict changes in the market and provide solutions before people even realize they need them. You cannot meet your customers' needs on a long-term basis unless you are willing to innovate.

If you remain stagnant, your business will eventually flounder. You have to come up with new ideas that excite your customers and meet their needs if you want to have staying power. Talented, innovative people want to work for innovative companies. You aren't going to attract someone who is going to create the next big thing unless your company has a history of creating.

Innovators want to be challenged and encouraged to create on a regular basis, so you need a culture of innovation to recruit that talent. Make a name for your company by being innovative and then watch the resumes pile in.

Innovators from all over will want to work with you, and then something magical will happen. Your company will become even more innovative. You will experience more growth, stand out from competition even more, and meet your customers' needs in ways you never imagined. That's when your company will reach an entirely new level.