There are many reasons that business are failing in today environment, one of the reason perhaps the most important is the lack of innovation. Business owners must encourage themselves and empower their people to take creative and entrepreneurial approach to exploit new opportunities.
The best way to create value is to innovate your organization and to stay ahead your competition in order to create temporary monopolies where yours is the only in town.
Innovation can be bring in your team by harnessing the creative power of your people. The goal is to turn them into opportunistic entrepreneurs or lateral thinkers.
Lateral thinking is a new approach of doing business which is emphasized in Paul Sloane book " Lateral thinking skills". Lateral thinking means approaching business challenges from new direction in order to create better solutions.
According to Paul Sloane the key elements of creating a truly innovative and entrepreneurial organization can be summarized in the following steps:
- Paint an inspiring vision
- Build an open, receptive, questioning culture
- Empower people at all levels
- Set goals deadlines and measurements for innovation
- Use creativity technique to generate a large number of ideas
- Review, combine, filter and select ideas
- Prototype the promising proposal
- Welcome failure and manage risk
- Analyze results and roll out the successful projects
