Redwood Consulting & Training
Innovation and Improvement
"The species that survived were not the most intelligent - they were the most adaptable to change".
- Introductory Awareness Session: covering the importance of innovation and improvement to business survival and longevity - with examples of good practices. This session enables the organisation to audit itself during and develop an top level approach for implementing improvements.
- Training and Facilitating the introduction of improved innovation and improvement, in order to agree a detailed
approach and process to follow, along with the development of 'Facilitator' skills amongst key people who will be leading its introduction.
Winning organisations are those where people are thinking and not just doing the job. People's ideas are being actively encouraged, appreciated and recognised as both a competitive and motivating edge to the business.
When people feel their ideas are valued and that they're able to influence not just their own performance, but that of others, it creates a high level sense of job satisfaction that is hard for the competition to surpass.
Only managers and team leaders can truly make this happen effectively by purposefully managing innovation and improvement - its needs a proactive set of processes and positive attitude; a suggestion box makes little in-roads as it's a reactive process.
Tapping into this competitive resource
Ways to manage innovation and improvement
- Research & Development - Dedicated resources and processes to researching and developing new products and technologies to improve
value to the customer.
- Strategic Improvement Initiatives - with performance improvement teams being established on demand to deal
with critically important areas (e.g. cost reduction for a product range; Improved quality and customer service; streamline a
process).
- Visits to external industries for simple and radically different ways to can drive step changes in your performance.
- Benchmarking
within industry sectors so as to drive the need for improvement.
- Continuous improvement being managed within individual
teams who have dedicated monthly sessions to identify and manage their own improvement.
- Define the processes for managing
innovation and improvement within the company management system, with measures of activity and improvement.
- Training
in innovation and improvement techniques and skills so that people can take ownerhsip for managing improvement effectively.
No Innovation results in declining profit
Gradual Innovations sustain level of profit.
Progressive innovations drive improved profit
Timescale
Profit
Charles Darwin