The Innovator’s Tool Kit by Dr. Ralph Katz is published by Harvard Business Press, Boston, 2009 and includes 10 practical strategies to help you develop and implement innovation. Whatever you do in life, you are doing some sort of innovation. If you find a better way or one that is more suited to you, you have innovated. If you have thought is there a better method? is there a solution to my problem? then you have innovated. Whether you have taken the idea to the market, the market has embraced it and you and your company made money, that is a different story. However we are all innovators because we want to do something easier, better, less expensive, needed to create better efficiencies, we innovate to solve a problem. The book also includes charts and questions to help you, if you rather look on line try http://www.elearning.hbsp.org/businesstools. The important thing a book such as this one does for you is help you focus and bring ideas to market.

As the idea moves from great idea to something that can work, one of the critical aspects after time and resources have been allocated to working the idea is getting a handle on risk. The risk is between two aspects – getting it right and making money from the idea or getting it wrong and needing a quick exit. The easiest method to gain a handle is to do a risk matrix with the headings new to the company, adjacent to current offerings, and similar to current offerings on one side reflecting the product/technology. The other side is same as present, adjacent to present and new to the company reflecting the intended market. As the dots are marked you have a better understanding of the probability of failure is. For information about the matrix is found in an article in the Harvard Business Review, Dec 2007 in the article written by George S Day “is it Real? can we Win? and is it worth doing?

There is no easy answer about innovation except it eventually is a decision made by people. A great number of variables must be in place – your boss or your organization has to be willing to want to do it; you need to find a champion to move the idea through the company; resources need to be found to try; the solution has to solve a problem or maybe just use the assets of the company better. Years ago the author worked for a family owned company which was sitting on wonderful assets but really did not want to change anything more than at the margins. Only the highest senior level people were allowed to make a decision and they quickly learnt making too many meant a short career. The author had to go around the leadership team find a champion and when they were successful, others would take the credit. When they were not, the blame went downwards fast. Google has a policy where people spend 20% of their time working on their own projects and this had lead to many different ways for the company to grow and expand its reach. The difference between the two companies above is night and day, but both need innovation.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, companies which own a almost guaranteed part of the market, unless they lose money from other ventures, they tend to be conservative in their operations. In is important as a shareholder to determine even if they have a monopoly position how innovation is handled and what is different than a few years ago. There are some very good companies that rest on the work of the founders, what would the founder do and after a couple of years are afraid of making simple but effective decisions to make use of the assets they have.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions