What is Innovation Debt?
Does your organization suffer from innovation debt?
That is the definition of innovation debt is when you do not maintain or perform the proper care and feeding of innovation.
You will discover these things about Innovation Debt:
1. How often should you do innovation or perform it?
2. How to innovate
3. Innovation examples and
4. How to avoid innovation debt
We will share specific samples that we and some others have we’ve come up with.
How often should you innovate
The 3M Company employees do this weekly. There folks spend 10% of their time every week on innovative ideas. That’s four hours, doing innovation, and creating something new. That is why Post-Its exist today. They came from this 3M innovation process.
How often is your organization doing this?
Are you doing this weekly, monthly, quarterly?
We recommend doing this frequently, at a minimum monthly.
How to innovate
The first thing to do is start looking at your assets – people, buildings, equipment, manufacturing, supplies.
Look at the assets you have and determine if you can repurpose them:
– Can you switch the order of them?
– Can you collaborate with them?
– Can consume them differently?
Here are some examples to illustrate repurposing assets.
Innovation Examples
Hotels
What if you could use hotels like you did for Netflix? You paid a monthly fee and you get access to movies.
For a hotel, you would pay a monthly fee and get access to the rooms. This could not be unlimited rooms at the hotel. But what if you said, “I’m will give you $X every month and that will guarantee me X nights at the hotel. “
How could hotels look at how they offer their products differently?
Transportation – Service
If a business uses cars, vans, trucks, or whatever for transportation. And no matter what type of company, construction, HVAC, any repair company.
What if you could take those vehicles and use them in off hours for a different purpose during those hours?
If it is during COVID-19 phase, only essential services can operate. Could you repurpose those vehicles to be essential? To carry food, medical supplies or construction supplies?
That’s what you can do to repurpose your current assets.
Transportation – Delivery
Also, other innovative idea is to have delivery vehicles transport both ways full. So, if you drop off items, find something else to fill up the truck to come back full.
Or can you partner with another business so expenses are minimized. Or collaborate with a customer so expenses are reduced.
What can we put in that truck, or that vehicle, or that car so it is full and comes back full?
People
Maybe your employees have a strength or a hobby that you can repurpose or use.
Maybe they can help come up with fresh ideas and offerings that you weren’t doing before.
Use your resources as much as possible.
Bundling
We all see this often when you buy a brand new computer. They pre-load it with a bunch of software already installed on it. That is a collaboration or bundling at work.
When you buy a car, they always want to bundle in a warranty.
When you purchase from a wine store, could you bundle the wine and the desert for people?
Or a restaurant could offer a multi-meal package. Two or three meals so their people don’t have to cook for the next three nights, or the next three days, or the next three meals.
Hair and nail salons
Could you take your supplies to your customers or have your customers pick them up? Could you make the products, or the color, or nail polish, or whatever supplies people need available.
Put it in the bag and let them pick it up and provide a video on how they can do it themselves?
Photographer, Videographer and Fitness/Trainer
A photographer or videographer and even a fitness person, you can go to your customer’s house?
We had a photographer come to our house, stand on the street about 20 feet away, and take a “porch photo.”
Could you do something similar for a video? Even if you’ve got a special event and you want to celebrate it because we can’t have a large grouping number of people are you able to take a picture or a video from afar?
Could a fitness trainer train their client from “afar? “
Go into the backyard where they are 20-feet apart and still give that motivation and accountability?
Or could the trainer look through the window? Plan this otherwise it’s creepy. But, you know, could you be looking through the window and train them as opposed to just doing over zoom?
How to avoid innovation debt
There is a time and a place to do innovation. Scheduling it in to your normal work environment will help, otherwise it will not happen.
Organization needs to stay fresh and create opportunities for yourself and your employees and your customers.
And so, if you regularly schedule it, and you will brainstorm and make the ideas happen.
Determine the best process internally on how you want to roll it out, how often you want it to occur.
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