Innovation is not only coming up with great ideas but starting instead to articulate the right customer problem. It’s also about people, leadership, culture, and values at the workplace. It is more than just new products or services; it is about the improvement of the full customer experience. It is about being better and faster at what you do, providing better connections, enjoying opportunities, adding value, and reducing opportunity for competitors to steal market share.

There are many examples about businesses trying to solve the wrong problems and therefore not being the best they can be at innovation. If we think about the structure of conventional companies, most of them have their processes and ways of working built around operational excellence with little room for creativity.

Thinking about companies that got caught up in their success at the expense of a focus on the future: the example we like to give in our training is Blackberry.

At one point, Blackberry had a large majority of the smartphone market. However, they kept focusing on answering the question “How do we make the best smartphone for business users?”. When the question they should have been asking was “How do we make a phone that is great for both business and social use?” Let’s be honest, people want to play candy crush or use social media on their way home. Naturally moving towards one device for both business and social use. But Blackberry realised this too late, and its demise was lightning fast. In 2011, they sold 50 million units and had around a 50% share of the smartphone market in the US. By 2016, they had stopped manufacturing their own phones.

A sound knowledge of innovation tools and techniques can prevent these failures from occurring. We are happy to see more and more companies are acquiring some life changing innovation techniques in small ways that are not only helping them  to improve the big picture inside their own structure but also inside the insurance market.

As a part of our work at Ninety we love seeing the increased demand of using training as a way to future-proof the organisation, their people and teams for the future that’s coming. Whether in person or online innovation training, we are seeing our clients evolve to be better at understanding their customer needs, and therefore moving faster from operational excellence to the increased use of creativity and innovation dynamics, to solve their problems in different ways.

The thing that we can highlight from our own experience is training graduates that are just starting in an organisation. Our innovation Bootcamp for graduates has proven to have an enormous impact as it provides them the tools and techniques to solve problems in an innovative way, but also, as it has served as a way to spread the knowledge across departments and colleagues, and led to an increase in ‘can do attitude’. I like to see it as a seed that is planted just at the beginning of their career path and that blossoms more and more, inspiring others and creates a solid ground where to build upon.

Answering the question: Does innovation hold the key to success? My direct answer will be yes, and the reason why, as I articulated at the beginning, innovation is not only coming up with great and big ideas, It is more than that:

• Innovation allows you to meet your customer needs, not the ones you think they have, the real ones, their pains, what they need to focus on.

• Innovation helps you make a niche for yourself in competition in the industry or market you operate in,

• Innovation helps with your future growth, and helps the business grow in leaps and bounds.

By seeing these examples, we can safely say that innovation is not a one-time action but an ongoing process that keeps building over time. Successful companies need ideas to keep growing, and it is with innovation that helps to drive the vision of the future.

Organisations that wish to succeed must embrace it or risk falling.