Anything new is a risk. But a business that doesn’t accept new ideas, new processes, and new people will be unable to continue, much less compete. Innovation is the cornerstone of success, especially in a world where AI and emerging technologies can rapidly transform how we work, how we assess our progress, and what we deliver to our customers. According to the Government’s Innovation and Growth Report, UK organisations that innovate grow at around twice the rate of those that don’t. But innovation that can transform businesses is also an enormous risk.
And the speed of transformation only adds to the complexity of the equation. The United Kingdom Innovation Survey 2023 indicates only 36% of UK businesses surveyed were innovation active, a reduction from 45% in 2020.
Why are we less invested in innovation when the evolution of technology is accelerating?
Change, the act of inviting something new into our businesses, involves decisions. Despite risks, fast-tracking the decision-making process can accelerate the adoption of innovation and lead to growth.
Why is making decisions to support innovation so difficult?
- Instability. Our environment is in constant motion. There are new technologies, political uncertainty, and resourcing constraints.
- Interrelations. It’s challenging to assess how seemingly unrelated factors are connected to our decisions.
- No blueprint. There is no guide to support a decision on innovation because no one has done it before.
- Goals. Accepting goals will change may not be welcome, but it’s necessary.
- Team. Your team hasn’t made this decision before either.
When you can acknowledge what you’re doing hasn’t been done before, you can accept risk and assess the potential rewards of innovation.
There’s a lot to lose
Leaders are responsible for results, people, resources, and their reputations to name but a few. Many decisions they make are data-based. They may have history and fact-based business insight to consider, plus the sector or industry may also provide evidence to explore.
The way we make most decisions puts rational arguments and measurement first, so next steps are careful and measured.
But innovation asks you to take your organisation somewhere new, somewhere it’s not been before. So, when faced with a decision on innovation, you probably won’t have access to data, or examples from your industry.
What do you do?
How to fast-track decisions on innovation
- Ask. It’s easy to deflect from a decision by inventing an either/or strategy that lets you find a balance between two options. That’s the path to incremental change – not innovation. Decide what matters and don’t be deterred.
- Accept. Your starting point will change. Be ready for that.
- Test. Start with an assumption and see if it works in the field. Test your hypothesis.
- Take risks. Start with the most important part of your plan. If, for example, it’s an innovation that will directly affect your customers, take your test case to a big customer. Or rank by importance the impacts your plan will have from one to ten and explore the most important one first. If you make the test inconsequential, the results will be too.
- Don’t wait. Gaining organisation-wide approval for the plan can take months or longer, and some people will still use their pocket vetoes. Change isn’t always about consensus. Act decisively and get support from your influencers.
- Know your constraints. Budgets, laws, and regulations are there for a reason, and each has an impact on what we can do for our organisations and our customers. What holds us back forces us to think creatively to solve problems.
Innovation requires a different mindset; one that accepts risks and looks for resilience and reward. The more we apply business-as-usual thinking to innovation, the less likely we are to make the right decisions and gain the advantage we need to stay ahead and succeed during uncertainty.
Deciding why, how, and when to innovate is a challenge, one that defines us as leaders.
At Peregrine, we’re constantly assessing the impact of innovation on our clients. Peregrine Future Talent, a programme dedicated to training and developing graduates, college leavers, and job-switchers in IT, programming, data analytics, and business skills, now offers low-code/no-code training, despite the platforms being in their infancy. The low-code/no-code market is expected to quadruple in the next five years, and we want to ensure organisations across the UK have access to a valuable new stream of talent. And if your innovation roadmap includes AI, we can train and develop people with the right blend of technical skills and personal resiliency
