Here are the Two Kinds of Innovation Enterprises Must Leverage

What’s causing this issue? It’s a few different things, all interacting together in a similar way to a combustion engine. New information has become available to more people via the internet. That led to two things: the demand from consumers for more and the ability of creators to build more.

When these two elements — consumer demand and the ability to build — come together, it opens opportunities for new market entrants. As the costs of starting up a tech-based business fall to record lows of nearly nothing, it’s easier than ever to start challenger companies.

However, the combustion that produces a large company’s biggest issues also provides its greatest opportunities. Instead of hearing the word ‘innovation’ and seeing technologists cranking out the latest cool app, large corporations need to think about it like any other process: structured, measurable, and made to serve business goals, not made for its own sake.

There are two kinds of innovation that large enterprises must understand and leverage so that ‘innovation’ becomes a weapon in your arsenal, not a weapon used against you.

Just as old business frameworks have become defunct and new ones rose up, innovation is a new process that’s built for the modern world.

The key goal of internal innovation is to optimize your core business and produce a 5 to 10 percent (or more) increase in efficiency. This efficiency can be defined in multiple ways:

This system can be used for multiple issues as well, providing incremental improvement to many systems, netting out at significant efficiency gains.

Internal innovation should always be your starting point for two key reasons:

However, internal innovation has its natural limits. No matter how big your organization is, you will not have all the insight and knowledge you need within your four walls. If you focus solely on internal innovation, you risk falling in on yourself, as famous examples like Blockbuster and Eastman Kodak eerily illustrate.

Even when a 5 to 10 percent efficiency bump represents millions or billions of dollars, there’s more at stake. Innovation is forcing all companies to think differently and build differently, meaning large enterprises will have to completely transform over time.

That’s where external innovation comes in, offering two key benefits:

In some cases, it doesn’t make financial sense to build everything in-house. For example, you might be working on an internal innovation project to empower salespeople. You might redesign the prospecting and closing process internally, but realize you need a technology tool to aid the sales reps in executing this new design.

If the technology would cost you 10 full-time developers working for 6 months to build in-house, the salary costs and time costs are enormous. However, signing up for a SaaS product costing $50,000 per year is, by contrast, far cheaper and enables you to get started immediately.

Getting out of the four walls of your office is essential for new ideas, relationship building, and learning from sector experts. In the world of innovation, this means looking to connect with:

Who you seek out depends on which challenges you’re trying to solve, but a good external innovation strategy leverages all of these ecosystems as part of their tool kit.

When it comes to successful innovation, an informed crowd is more powerful than a single mind. Employees know the company at all levels, and external partners know the process of innovation. Developing internal systems magnified by external partnerships creates a new engine for every organization, leading to more growth and adaptability.

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