AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
Not every company is led by a visionary like recently retired Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs. But nearly every company needs to come up with new ideas to stay relevant.
So how can ordinary companies turn themselves into Apples?
Dave Plunkert Developing new ideas involves a certain amount of experimentation and failure, as well as prioritizing of the most promising ideas.Management scholars, who have spent years studying what drives creativity within companies, say there are specific ways firms can generate ideas and execute new products.
"Apple's success doesn't have to be a mystery to us," says Vijay Govindarajan, a professor of global business at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and former chief innovation consultant at General Electric Co. "It can be replicated."
Mr. Jobs is known for being deeply involved in the creation and development of his company's products. But in many highly innovative companies, great ideas come from all levels of an organization, not just from the top, experts say. At most companies, the problem is, employees have little input.
Management experts say there are specific ways firms can generate and execute new ideas.
Solicit input. Great ideas come from all levels of the organization, not just from the top.Provide workers time for "unofficial activity," set time to work on creative ideas.Executing ideas is often tougher than generating them. Companies need a clear process to prioritize, resource and test ideas quickly and cheaply, so that they can afford to experiment.Research has found that the average U.S. employee's ideas, big or small, are implemented only once every six years, says Alan G. Robinson, a professor at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. More innovative companies typically implement far more employee ideas, Dr. Robinson says.
Senior leadership is still important: There need to be forward-thinking leaders who "allow for the culture of ideas to percolate up," says Dr. Robinson. That means providing time, staff, funding and other resources for new ideas to be executed.
Some companies, such as Google Inc., provide workers time for "unofficial activity"—set time to work on creative ideas. Giving employees time for open-ended ideas can be expensive, especially with many companies short-staffed, but it may pay off. "When managers cut to the bone, one of the things they stifle is innovation," says Dr. Robinson.
Google's Gmail, Google News and some of the company's other products came from its policy of letting engineers use 20% of their time for company-related projects of their choosing. There have been numerous home-grown product busts, as well, such as Google Wave and Google Buzz, the latter of which included a major privacy flap.
Executing ideas is often tougher than generating them. Developing new ideas involves a certain amount of experimentation and failure, as well as prioritizing of the most promising ideas. The key, says Dr. Govindarajan of Dartmouth, is to keep development costs low and test assumptions quickly so that companies can afford to experiment.
Observation can help companies understand not just what people say they want, but what they really need. Clayton M. Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies innovation, and a co-founder of Innosight LLC, a Boston consulting company, says Procter & Gamble Co.'s new-product success rate in recent years came from the company observing that people were concerned about how their clothes smell (Febreze) and were always looking for simpler ways to clean the floor (Swiffer.)
P&G which today spends about $2 billion annually on research and development, overhauled its new-business strategy over the last decade after realizing that just 15% of its ideas, developed in more of an ad-hoc approach, were meeting revenue and profit targets. Now, innovation specialists guide teams working on new businesses. There's a step-by-step manual of procedures and processes to monitor progress.
P&G credits the new approach with boosting its once slow-growing Tide brand from a line of laundry detergent to a brand that includes a variety of add-on products and even a chain of Tide Dry Cleaners. P&G says Tide's wider range has almost doubled its sales over the last decade to nearly $24 billion.
Not all new ideas succeed: Swash, a line affiliated with Tide that helped freshen clothes between washes, was discontinued this year.
—Ellen Byron and Amir Efrati contributed to this article.View the original article here
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