As today's pace of change continues to accelerate, companies need to successfully innovate to stay ahead, and yet most new products fail. To transform innovation into competitive advantage, leaders need to ensure their organization has both the right mindset and the right skill set.
Innovation should be infused into a company's DNA, starting with the top leaders and filtering throughout all functions and levels. This involves approaches like building innovation-related metrics into reviews and identifying "innovation champions" to help implement programs and processes to stimulate agility and creativity.
New product development and launch must take place within the strategic context of the larger company.Leaders need to carefully consider whether new products will enhance the organization's overall positioning and constantly reexamine their product portfolio as market conditions evolve.
With innovation, failure is the status quo. Companies with environments that share and discuss the failures effectively use them to their advantage. Innovation is an iterative process in which it is keenly important to use insights from failures as input to improve on the next try.
