We all know that 2020 has been tough for businesses. But with a vaccination roll-out just around the corner, thoughts can begin turning towards making 2021 a year of success, rather than just survival. To rebuilding revenues and stimulating growth. To planning how we create new jobs rather than just safeguarding existing ones.
As with nearly every crisis in history, it will be innovation that is the catalyst for growth and helping businesses and economies thrive again.
Until recently, many successful companies had comfortably made money and hit their targets, without really needing to innovate. But, the last twelve months have been a wake-up call. They have shown how risky this can be, and even these ‘comfortable’ incumbents will now realise that ongoing innovation is more important than ever. Something which will come into even sharper focus as government aid schemes end and consumer behaviour is changed for good.
Businesses need to embrace innovation as a core function of what they do every day, rather than viewing it as something which they can turn on and off as and when needed. After all, even after COVID-19 is behind us, other crises can and will come along to disrupt the landscape of every sector. And many of these could have devastating effects, think climate change, water scarcity, resource exhaustion or even conflict.
Because of this, an ‘always on’ approach to innovation is becoming critical for every business. Without this, in time businesses will face, at best, extreme turbulence, and at worst obsolescence.
Even before the pandemic, business that failed to innovate put themselves at risk, with many well-known examples of complacent businesses being disrupted and succeeded by some form of innovation, either in technology or business model.
And that’s because innovating and building a culture of innovation is not easy. Businesses generally feel uncomfortable with innovation and struggle with a lack of skills, tools and processes to make it a core part of what they do. And besides, it can be difficult to find time to think about what you could be doing tomorrow when you are so busy delivering what you need to today.
This can all mean that innovation is pushed to the end of the to do list. A procrastination that will inevitability lead to more and more urgent or existential problems to deal with. In fact, lack of innovation is a key reason why, even before the pandemic, more than a tenth of businesses fail every year.
Having spent decades helping the world’s most innovative companies keep on being innovative, we know how difficult this can be. And that’s why we created Propeller – a new kind of innovation management software. It has one simple goal – to help businesses create an ongoing culture of creativity and innovation that is ‘always on’.
Propeller helps make innovation a core function of what you do, every day. It provides the tools needed to unlock creativity, to share knowledge and to create the new ideas that will help your business stay ahead of the market and ahead of the competition.
It provides easy-to-follow innovation processes and tools that can be applied to any business challenge, large or small, tactical or strategic, without taking lots of time out of your day-to-day activities. It trains your teams to deliver effective innovation sessions and it encourages them to think creatively and share their ideas every day.
Ultimately, Propeller will help create an innovation pipeline for your business that can deliver solutions to your ongoing challenges and opportunities, no matter your size or what you do.
Propeller has been developed by a team of people with real, long-term experience of delivering innovation in a variety of settings, from the largest corporations to the most disruptive SMEs and start-ups. It is born out of learnings from good and bad experiences of innovation, so it maximises the best and addresses the bad, ultimately creating a platform that can make any organisation innovate consistently for long term success no matter where they are starting from.
The Propeller team also have experience of delivering ideas not just coming up with them. This additional rigour is built into the platform ensuring the ideas you create are based on true insights, are deliverable and can overcome challenges and address opportunities.
Building a culture of innovation may sound scary or an insurmountable challenge. But you know your customer and market better than anyone else – all you need now is a helping hand to use that knowledge to make innovation happen every day. And that’s where we can help.
Get in touch to discuss how Propeller can help your business innovate today.