Reading this you may ask yourself whether the omnipresence of brands and branding in our daily lives is going too far? Why does branding lay claim to being connected to as well as inspiring a company's innovation success? How? Is branding not just an image building exercise?

In diesem Beitrag erfahren Sie:

• what innovation means and where the limits of innovation are,
• how to 'innovate' successfully and
• how branding gives play purpose.

Introduction

We know that the mechanisms of branding can help lift and sustain innovation levels in any given company. We discuss here that branding may be the missing ingredient in innovation. That innovation is best inspired and directed by a companys focus on its brand.

We are speaking from 20 years experience in putting the spirit of innovation at the top of a companys agenda and harvesting results. Boehringer Ingelheim is a client and case study that gives reality to our intellectual argument.

Innovate or die!

Companies are continuously challenged to change and innovation is core to a companys survival and success. This is especially true amidst our current credit, economic, energy and environmental crisis with pressures pointing companies towards real change offering real choice. The change we need will not be delivered by just the flat, efficiency and effectiveness driven change management of the 1990s.

With the economy of change prevailing, innovation must be explored beyond improving existing products and services whilst reducing labour costs. Innovation increasingly must be applied at a higher level, creating new markets, meeting economic, environmental and energy related needs and wishes at a deeper level.

The challenge for brands and branding in this context is to help companies be inspired to innovate decisively and deliberately across the depth and breadth of an organisation.

What is innovation?

Innovation is a glorified parameter of competition in todays global market. An indicator of businesses knowledge, ideas and development. From an economic market perspective, it is connected to improving and adjusting offerings one way or the other.

In any commercial context, innovation implies huge effort and process being linked to future forecasting, projections, planning and so forth.

Companies most regularly position innovation against parameters like incremental or radical, open or closed, internal and external. On top of these axis companies can level out and decide if an innovation is revolutionising, niche or modular and also if it is technology-, value-, service- or socially driven through open sources, brokers, producers, etc. etc.

Much academic work has been dedicated to innovation so much so that we now can split and splice innovation from invention and extension. In order to illustrate this, lets use the classic illustration of a new idea: a light bulb.

Invention is when something is created, processed and built from scratch and most probably the first of its kind such as the regular light bulb most prominently launched by Thomas Edison.

Innovation then is usually applied for improvement, adjustment and modification of an already existing offering ... such as the halogen light bulb or the compact fluorescent lamp the energy saving light bulb.

Extension is stretching an offering horizontally into different product or service categories, segments or perhaps even industries.

From a branding perspective this and other writings about innovation seem academic. Innovation as a vision implies the order to stay ahead, up-to-date and forward focused.

The spirit of the New

As discussed: extensions, innovations or inventions, are all achieved fundamentally in the same spirit and culture. Lets call it the spirit of the New.

Does New come from connecting the past with the future or simply out of the blue? New is not necessarily a reflection of a market tendency or spotting a direct demand. It is not always found by market related research or other analytical tools and management processes, splitting perspectives into atoms for further detail.

The unused potential in people to do New is massive! Most companies are set-up such that employees use a fraction of their creative capacity at work. Meaning for example that when people are off-duty, they burn off creative fuel less witnessed at work on cooking, playing football, DIY and planning the next vacation.

Un-tapping employee capacity ought to be placed at the top of the agenda when companies are looking for what is New. When planning for, pinning down or projecting New, it is important to understand how companies can steer and stimulate this.

The limits of innovation

Innovation is most often very difficult to forecast and project and includes a lot of organisational knowledge cul-de-sacs. Many employees may have good and really compelling ideas, most often though they seem to get caught up in organisational bottlenecks or simply just lost in the day-to-day operation of business activities and roles.

Sensibility issues occur in the process of innovating for instance when a business is trying to conform to new industry and market regulation, reduce their energy foot-print, improve quality, extend their range and create new markets and numerous factors and aspects have to be considered involving everybody and everything in a company.

Another concern for businesses is the lack of understanding of the powers and processes of innovation. Innovation is often misunderstood and degraded as a post-modern marketing tool being curtailed as a need based reflection and delivered on-demand only.

Despite grand announcements religiously reiterating the importance of innovation at corporate gatherings that it must focus outright on the future, on developing businesses, markets, products, services and people it often remains isolated and propriety to the R&D Research & Development department.

Businesses tend to have difficulties in figuring out how to instil innovation across all of their operations lessening the impact upon their business model, set-up and structures as a key strategic driver.

And how can it be different in companies that live by deductive market research driven marketing schemes. Where everything is measured and monitored in detail to establish or grow a market share in the name of customer focus. Innovation will be patchy and ultimately unsuccessful when and where innovation is a push-oriented discipline, purposefully seeking ever new niches. The importance of innovation to a companys success is heard, understood and agreed but not always acted upon.

How to innovate successfully?

Probably one of the most important factors in instigating and stimulating innovation per se is the aspiration of the organisational management and the existence of a real innovation culture and spirit within the business.

Effective innovation comes from and is for people; what they see, hear or feel and how they interact with others. Inarguably, people want to work with things they sincerely believe in and therefore enjoy. For any business wanting to partake in the innovation game and apply innovation strategically it is paramount to put people first.

A genuine interest in and about innovation must be established. All people in a given company must have general knowledge about the various types of innovation. They must be provided with a framework about what and when to innovate.

To liberate creative and free thinking most companies are encouraging playful behaviour. Google probably is the most prominent player, practising worldwide the most advanced campus style based culture born in Palo Alto.

If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play says John Cleese [1]. The message is not new and the question remains how to channel and process creativity and new ideas into innovation. They begin as a seed and need fertile ground, cultivation and careful harvesting to break through the corporate crust.

Not everybody is a natural born innovator and without harnessing and directing employees potential creative companies can run severe risks of ending up with meaningless, bland, boring, and totally undirected initiatives.

Playful ideas need to have purpose to lead to positive decision making and action. To turn creative employees into constructive employees give them a purpose to play.