Move to Continuous Innovation

“He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.”
-Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

Your firm’s ability to grow is directly related to your ability to innovate – truly innovate. Without it, your business may continue to grow. Until it doesn’t. And while your firm conducts “innovation activities,” it likely is falling short of what’s possible… and what your growth aspirations require.

Companies need to be able to walk down two paths simultaneously- one path focused on evolution which seeks to consistently improve upon what you’ve already developed and commercialized, and one path focused on revolution – creating a new set of valued solutions, markets, or business models that did not exist prior. This is challenging to create and maintain a balanced focus on both, even the most mature of companies.

Your firm’s success with innovation depends on a variety of factors, including an ability to capture and honestly review a very broad spectrum of ideas, its ability to manage innovation projects from ideation to post-commercialization, to have the maturity to kill projects anywhere through the iterative process of customer engagement, and to have clear marketing, sales, and financial goals. Since innovation should be a complex and company-wide endeavor, it requires a set of silo-busting leaders, practices, and processes to structure, organize, and encourage it in an ongoing fashion. That’s where we come in.

The Mier Practice will work with you and your teams to adjust existing innovation activities or build a new comprehensive system, depending on your needs. We have created successful company-wide innovation programs and while there is no universal solution for all firms, there are some crucial elements consistent with all engagements with The Mier Practice.

• All of your employees need to be involved in understanding your firm’s goals and contributing ideas in support of them.
• Your customers of yesterday, today, and tomorrow are all critical inputs into each step of the innovation process.
• Innovation is an ongoing set of processes for the collection, evaluation, development, testing, and commercialization of new value creating products and services… it should never end.
• An ongoing balance between quantitative and qualitative input is required throughout this entire process, it is limiting to rely on just one approach.
• While most innovation is incremental, it is imperative that organizations know how to identify, nurture, and develop breakthrough and disruptive innovations.

If you’d like to discuss how The Mier Practice can help you develop a true innovation engine, or simply want another set of eyes to look over what you currently have in place, drop us a line. We really love this stuff.

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