Innovation can help businesses achieve many of the main goals which include boosting profits, introducing new products and services, as well as establishing a unique customer appeal. It also helps companies remain competitive in an ever rapid-moving marketplace with more and more industries being impacted by technological advancements.
Business innovations can take a variety of forms, including the creation of new products and services, enhancing processes or launching marketing campaigns and changing company culture. They may also involve changes to existing products or services, for example, adding features or improving customer service. The most successful innovations are those that are new and useful.
Novel ideas are rarely the source of innovation if they don’t provide solutions to the real-world problems. A creative idea must be useful to both the organization as well as its customers to be considered an innovation. This is why an business innovation is considered successful when it is innovative and valuable.
A successful business innovation can not only create new sources of value as well as improve decision-making, solving problems and communication within the company. Businesses should be on the lookout for trends in the market to identify business opportunities for innovation.
It is generally best to look outside of the field in which a company operates to discover innovative ideas. For example the creation of the modern accounting machine was a business innovation by IBM when the company realized that banks could not purchase new machines in 1933 due to the fact that they had no money.
The introduction of scleral-type lenses in eye surgery is yet another example of business innovation. Alcon added an antioxidant to an enzyme that doctors used for over 50 years to eliminate cataracts. This was a breakthrough in business that resulted in an entirely new product as well as the creation of a global monopoly for the company.