Page 32 - Sustainability and entrepreneurship for CSO's and CSO networks Cambodia 1 November 2018

CHAPTER 9: INNOVATION
Products and services have a certain lifecycle. New products are to be developed and introduced. Your stakeholders’ wants and needs are changing over time and in these days quite fast. Your services can be less in demand while more competition comes in. Technological developments may render your services obsolete, too old fashioned or too expensive.
Innovation is:
Improving existing services or finding new ways and areas to use the
present ones
• Introducing new products and services, not available before
Innovation takes courage and is not without risk. Organisations that innovate have to invest in their capacity. It starts with having an open mind for new ideas and different views. An open mind is important to research and implement promising ideas. These ideas have to be feasible, match the organisations strategy and stakeholders’ needs and wants. Furthermore, you need resources to innovate: money, time and staff.
Innovation needs to be addressed strategically. It requires preparation, planning, budget, staff and organisational capacity. Crucial is the organisational culture. If there is no enthusiasm for innovation or change, or people are ‘bogged down on internal affairs’ (Black, Nicholls, 2004), it’s hard to create new products, services or projects. If this is the case, it is probably wise to start with strategic training and to find out whether the company is lacking skills or competencies, for instance, on marketing or management. When innovation seems impossible, then change your job.
New ideas
There are different techniques to boost creativity and to come up with new ideas, for example: brainstorming. Using this technique gives you relatively quick and easily a lots of ideas, in a joint process. It is important that the participants don’t judge each other’s ideas and encourage each other to come up with as many ideas as possible. Use a facilitator, who coordinates the process and who monitors to ensure the most important brainstorming rules are followed and goals are obtained.
Other popular tools are:
• mind mapping. This tool helps you to associate freely and can be used
easily individually.
turning around: Think of a museum and ask yourself the question: how can we prevent people from visiting us? By turning the answers around, new ideas can emerge by which more public can be attained.
• superhero method (Huyskens, Michels, 2011), by visualising a certain superhero and wondering how he or she would solve a specific problem (for example how to raise 50% more money next year), new ideas emerge.
• Task
To generate as many ideas as possible you can use the following exercise
• Create new services and products that do not exist yet
• Improve existing services
• Find a new way to use existing products or services
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You sometimes have to think out of the box when trying to find your services!
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