Paul A. Drucker, the author of Principles of Innovation, defined the principles of innovation as those that make it possible to create and realize positive changes for the better. These might change in a business or society at large.
In principle, Paul A. Drucker claimed that innovation is a way of creating and implementing practical systems. It involves the application of knowledge and scientific principles to solve problems. Here are some of the benefits of innovation and how the principles of the innovation can benefit you.
Types Of Innovation Drucker’s Five Principles of Innovation
Below are five principles that can help you take advantage of a new innovation you may have discovered.
1. Begin with an analysis of the opportunity.
2. Analyze the opportunity to see if people will be interested in using the innovation.
3. To be effective, the innovation must be simple and clearly focused on a specific need.
4. Effective innovations start small. By appealing to a small, limited market, a product or service requires little money and few people to produce and sell it. As the market grows, the company has time to fine-tune its processes and stay ahead of the emerging competition.
5. Aim at market leadership. If an innovation does not aim at leadership in the beginning, it is unlikely to be innovative enough to successfully establish itself. Leadership here can mean dominating a small market niche.
*Reference:
Drucker, Peter F. Innovative and Entrepreneurship, Practice and Principles. Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. 1985.
These concepts are important because each has different aspects, and they will help you implement innovation in the right manner. This means that the principles of innovation should be adopted as a whole because they form a basis for sustaining innovation. These are some aspects innovation leaders keep in mind when considering innovations or innovation processes.
Engineering Principles
Engineering principles are the basics of an innovation strategy. These include the need for a business to have the ability to change. A business must be able to update its technological strategy in order to deal with innovation ecosystems.
Marketability
Another important principle of innovation is the is market principles or “marketability” principle. The marketability of a product or technology is based on whether or not consumers will want or need that item. For example,
if you have invented a new detergent, but 99% of the population never needs it, then your detergent is considered an unprofitable investment. Similarly, the principles of innovation apply to technology strategy; if a new technology is not necessary or useful to the current users, it is not relevant to the future.
This culture of innovation may include a need to invest in research and development, innovative product developments, innovation teams, innovation environment or a company’s reliance on international sources for technology.
These principles of innovation can also affect your business model. For example, the principles of sustaining innovation may state that a business needs to develop new products or services constantly.
These principles may also point to the importance of a company’s culture because a company’s culture is often a determinant of the kind of innovative ideas that it can come up with. Some of the sustaining principles of innovation include the need for consumers to change their purchasing habits or to be willing to try new things.
Another aspect of the principles of innovation is the value of collaboration. When companies are able to collaborate effectively, innovations get produced faster, and there is a greater chance that a company will come up with a solution that solves a problem.
collaboration in innovating
Collaboration between different organizations, like a research wing and a venture wing in a corporation, could lead to innovations that would not have come from traditional means.
One example of collaboration innovation is when a computer programmer wants to come up with a better way to generate revenue for a particular company. The programmer will have to come up with innovative technologies that appeal to the business.
The idea should make the innovation visible and be able to forecast long-term success before the executives in charge of the company’s budget if the product innovation doesn’t see the light of day.
The benefit of coming up with an idea independently of the executives, says a vice president for research and development, should be considered, if the executives in charge of a certain budget were to view innovations from the outside perspective, it might not take them long to recognize that importance and something that they had originally thought up was actually an innovation.
Another advantage of the principles of innovation is the importance of a collaborative effort. This means that a team, say researchers in one wing of the company, could come up with an innovative idea. Then it would be up to the research wing to come up with a business case for the innovative idea.
The advantage of ten percent of innovations is that the company can make ten percent profit on their investments.
There are many experts who say that it takes about ten years for new ideas to show up on the market. It takes at least five years for such ideas to gain momentum in the market. The principles of innovation point to the need for more innovative ideas as long as there is a market for them.
Some innovators say that it may take twenty years for a new idea to enter the market. Many innovators believe that the time frame for truly innovative products and services to hit the market is faster than the blink of an eye, which is further from the truth.
Focusing on continuous innovation instead is more likely to grant realistic results than a one-trick pony. To process innovations while focusing on running a winning company is what sets great leaders apart.
In other words, the principles of innovation are meant to nudge the innovators to continuously look for ways of applying the lessons they have learned along the way so that they can continually be innovating and creating the most innovative products and services available.
