Innovations for Business Growth and Career Success

Lateral-thinking, Ideation , Experimenting and Implementing are the processes to innovate and stay ahead

Innovation is the process of turning ideas into manufacture-able and marketable form.” – Watts Humprey

As they say “Necessity is the mother of all invention” while uncertainty is a catalyst for innovation. In today’s world of high technology, you need to be imaginative and thinking out-of-the-box, to be a market leader. Today’s global market is quite turbulent as there is ever increasing uncertainty in political, socio-economic and technology environments. Therefore you and your team need to use all initiatives and creativity to evolve sustainable and cost-efficient products/services. You need to be creative and innovative to make a significant contribution to your organization/business. Creativity and innovations are not limited to engineering, manufacturing or product design. Innovation is equally applicable to marketing, advertising, teaching, artwork, music, dancing, sports and painting, weaving, smithy, pottery, journalism, photography, fashion design or cooking.  It could be improvement of a business process or industrial process. You need to develop your faculties for lateral-thinking and innovate cost-effective products and services, which can delight the customers.

To make your name in your organization, you are to be innovative doing something different than routine or doing the same thing differently, which has good look and feel and is more cost-efficient. Repeating the same process, product or service will slow down the progress of the organization and your team will become lazy and lesser productive.  Therefore stay committed to think ahead and innovate.

Your wholehearted commitment to the organization, customers, boss, team members and project/task in hand will propel you to innovate and excel in your performance. Some basic points for guidance to innovate are given in following sections.

What is Innovation? Innovation is not long drawn discovery or invention but a short and quick development of product/service to give better look and feel as well as better value for money to the customer. It could be doing same thing differently or doing different things than the existing ones.  It could relate to any thing which eliminates customer’s pain points - difficulty in operating, repair and maintaining, dismantling /reassembly and cumbersome to carry due to its weight, size or shape. It may also relate to  endurance, look and feel , space and comfort.

Frugal Innovation (FI). Also referred as Frugal Engineering (FE) is the process of reducing the complexity, customer’s pain-points  and cost in production of the product. It also relates to removing nonessential features from a durable good, such as a car, household appliances, and packaging. Indeed, FI provides functional solutions through limited available resources. FI concept was gainfully applied by Mr. Sam Pitroda (Tele-communications Advisor to the Government of India) in mid 1990s, when developing the famous telephone network of millions of token-phones booths in India. FI is a design innovation process in which the customer pain-points and urgent needs  are put first in order of priority  to develop   a product which has good look and feel, easy to operate,  adaptable, affordable for emerging market. FI has also social importance in addressing poverty, unemployment, pollution control and health issues by focussing on  inclusive growth and sustainable development.

Indian Jugaad. Jugaad is a (Hindi) word, quite popular in India for quickly fabricating a contraption with local effort and resources to tide over immediate problem.. It implies quick- fix solution to any problem. It could also refer to an innovative fix or a simple work-around, a solution. It could be just a contraption built by the end user of a car/van/ truck driver  or a farmer using tractor and related implements or could be  a water sprinkler. In its initial stages, it may not conform to safety standards Some manufacturing companies in India are adapt Jugaad and incorporate required safety standards as per Indian Nation Standards.  This initiative helps to reduce time and cost, otherwise required for  the research. The main benefit is its  easy adoption by the market since jugaad is an innovation  by the people, for the people (end users).

Improvisation. It is similar to jugaad  and used intuitively for immediate and temporary fixing of a problem. It could also relate to  sudden breakdown of a vehicle /machine or any  facility, by using available resources till you find proper workplace and resources  to fix the problem fully. It requires  common sense , creative thinking and fast reflexes to gather essential resources locally.

Who can innovate? You can innovate. Any one with open mind and ability to think-out-of-the-box can innovate. It could be your own effort or team work but with a missionary zeal without worrying for being first-time-right. Many a times a very weird idea and non conventional solution could result in sustainable innovation. Stay determined and open to suggestion.

Ideas Generation, Think beyond the existing or formal design specifications of a product and practice lateral thinking.  You need to stop way of traditional or logical thinking or proven algorithms, You should have time to do free wheeling and thinking afresh with open mind. Keep a small notebook in your pocket to note down ideas as these may occur to you an time anywhere.  Don’t worry about cost or failure at this stage. Do weekly/monthly sorting of recorded ideas to find doable and something out of the ordinary. Getting new idea is part of creative  thinking. Innovation idea need not be yours and it may be of any team member and it must be appreciated. Every idea may not be successful but you must be determined to make it work.

Area for Innovations. Innovation is not limited to engineering, product design or manufacturing. Instead many areas as listed below are candidates for innovation.

·        Automotive design and manufacturing – cars , scooters, motorcycles, trucks, trailers, motorboats.

·        Product design.  Furniture, decorative products  , safety gears etc.

·        Fashion Technology.  Garments, jewellery. shoes etc.

·        Cinematography and photography. Creativity, animation and image processing/.blending etc.

·        Mass Communications and Journalism. Creative story telling and taking  compelling video-clips or picture of scenes.

·        Book Authoring and content design. Introduce creativity and imagination while developing true storey or a fiction.

·        Teaching. To introduce creative thinking using word problems and narrative based assignment work. Use innovative and effective teaching aids. Demonstrate steps for innovation and introduce incentive.

·        Coaching in sports. Modification of gadgets , equipment or variation in posture and body action.

·        Sports Vehicles and Gears. Sports cars , motor boats, motor cycles, high pressure swim suits, cricket /base ball bats, helmets, skies , sledges etc.

·        Agriculture. Various implements for ploughing, trenching, plainer, sowing, water sprinklers, harvesting , crushers.

·        Carpentry. Introduce artistic look  and feel in furniture , wood carving

·        Painting and Artwork. Must have a theme and painting must convey that vividly.

·        Jewellery.  Artistic design and arrangement of gems and stones.

·        Dancing . It is great communication media conveying theme trough body language. The artist can have new costumes and posture/ limb movements to make dancing more absorbing and enjoyable for the audience.

·        Music. With digital technology available for recording and mixing facility , music instruments can produce very innovation tunes to delight the audience.

·        Cooking. There is flood of recipes available on the internet and many books have been published on the subject. There are many live-shows like “Master Chef“ competitions . This has given lot of momentum to innovative cooking and serving in restaurants and hotels. There are many institutes offering various course on various cosines of various countries.

·        Packaging. This is to develop a light, compact , secure , less costly , attractive  and safe for delivery of the product.

·        House hold gadgets. This includes complete range like washing machine, dish washer ,oven, microwave, refrigerator, gas burner, bread toaster , water purifier, air conditioner, pedestal / wall mounted fan, iron press, furniture etc.

·        Safety equipment. It relates to safety belts, helmets , goggles, fire-fighting equipment,

·        Food packing and bottling . Shape, size, material , ease of carrying and disposal,

·        Glass ware design and blowing, There can be lot of imagination in innovating various shapes and blend of glass ware.

·        Toys and entertainment electronics. This industry requires lot of creativity and continuous improvement to attract kids.

·        Process Improvement. It could be business proves or manufacturing process.

How to innovate ?   Innovation is an iterative process by taking existing design or planning a new design as per market demands and evolve a new design considering factors like weight,  size, dimensions, look and feel , cost,  durability , ease of  handling and maintenance and customer pain-points A simple process is shown below as a flowchart:

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Start , .Idea generation -> Idea selection through Brain storming session with the team to finalise actionable idea -> Bain sketching for refining design of chosen idea, ->  Develop a prototype /simulation model -> Verify with design specifications -> Seek customer validation -> Seek feedback > Redesign and optimise- > Develop new version -> Seek customer’s approval - > Keep refining till it meets customer’s expectations.-> Start production -> Launch the product in the market,  -> Complete documentation , Stop and celebrate.

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? Lateral-Thinking (LT). It is critically examining and questioning why you can’t do it other way around.  It could be just wild thought and that may produce most cost efficient product. Once you have an actionable idea, you must do an experiment on it to validate its suitability. A successful experiment will establish that your idea is workable and its product will be usable, safe, durable and cost-effective.  To develop your appetite for LT refer to following website and practice simple exercise . https://creativecorporateculture.com/creativity-exercises-improve-lateral-thinking/

https://www.creativeboom.com/

? Innovation for growth. Innovation is not invention and it could be some modification, improvement in look-and-feel, different material, ease of operation. Innovation provides you lead in the market and sustainability of business. Your employer/senior is always looking for new ideas/innovation to progress their business and that is the pathway to your success. Along with your team, you need to do lateral-thinking and experimenting new ideas to innovate. Your market demand will grow and career will get quantum jump.

? Experiment idea and validate with data. To find something new and innovate, you must develop a habit of lateral-thinking and questioning why not another way around, Once you have an actionable idea, you must do an experiment on it to validate its suitability /acceptability by the customer/market. A successful experiment will establish that your idea is workable and its product will be usable, safe, durable and cost-effective.

? Growth through innovation, Your Company can stay as market leader if you and your team and other teams keep thinking of new ideas, related to customer needs and emerging technologies. Market always needs the latest product/service and at affordable cost. Professionals working in educational institutes of higher learning and those working in universities must carry out research in emerging areas and market trends and publish in international journals of repute. Particularly, those pursuing academic or research as a career must do research to evolve new solutions. This will provide you better visibility and growth. If you possess skills of creative thinking and innovation, you will be always in demand. Be it it any engineering field or in bio-technology, or pharmaceutical field, you need to do research/experimentation and publish your research work. This way you share your idea with other innovators/research scholars and your knowledge grows further.

Your wholehearted commitment to the organization, customer, boss, team members and project/task in hand will propel you to innovate and excel in your performance. To stay ahead of your competitors, you and your team should be continuously looking out-of-the-box and evolve innovative solutions, ; which will  delight the customers.

Three types of innovation that are emerging in the current scenario are Frugal Innovation (FI), Sustainable Innovation (SI) and Reverse Innovation (RI). These innovations are basically concerned  with economic development and growth.

How to promote  innovation?   As a team manger or CEO/ president of an organisation / institution , you should  encourage innovation and be happy to bear the development cost. Allow team members to experiment with their new ideas and show creativity. Give good incentive, even if it is a small idea.  Depending upon the size of an organisation /institution, you may set up an inter-disciplinary innovation centre/club or Centre of Excellence (COE),  where people of all disciplines can interact  and experiment their new ideas.

Integration. As a manager, one of your prime roles is to integrate effort and subsystems to evolve a cost-efficient solution. It requires proper interfacing and readjusting for any incompatibility. Do not permit your team to discard any available and reusable work done by predecessors and don’t re-invent the wheel. Days are gone for having old concept of “all under one roof.” Instead, today so many things are available as Commercially off The Shelf (COTS) and you can   also outsource certain parts. You should be an efficient integrator to evolve a cost-efficient solution. A fully integrated team makes use of everybody’s, innovative ideas and exceeds expectations. That is what delights the customer or the employer and have sustained growth for market leadership.

For more information refer to my book – “Career Challenges during Global Uncertainty”, available on www.amazon.com.

Dr Sarbjit Singh, PhD , Former Hony Adviser , School of Engineering and Technology , Apeejay Stya University , Gurgoan, Haryana, India