It is that time of the year when we all have to reflect on our business during the past year and plan our strategy for the new one. It is time to check what has been functional and productive in your business until now, understand new opportunities, celebrate your success and make plans wisely for the upcoming year. 

Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, a small-business owner, or innovation manager at the large corporation, this is a perfect moment to plan your business and innovation strategy and to motivate your employees to be more innovative. As you go through your business planning, it’s important to consider and include factors of innovation process itself, such as:

• Innovation strategy or action plan to align innovation objectives with company objectives, to utilize and/or allocate resources for innovation and define metrics for measuring innovation impact.
• People or your most valuable asset with the capability and potential to be creative and innovative. The realization of this potential sets in motion when you create an environment that motivates and, at the same time, enables your employees to innovate.
• Technology or emerging and established technologies that support and facilitates an end-to-end innovation management process.
• Impact or metrics and indicators to measure innovation progress and further guide the decision-making process.

In order to help you level up your innovation efforts in your company, we created two Innovation checklists. The first one is Innovation Executive’s Checklist with the purpose to guide your innovation strategy, people, technology and innovation impact.  And the second one, Everyday Innovation Checklist, empowering and motivating your employees to be more proactive and included into innovation process. 

Now, it is up to your CEO’s, top management and executives to conduct a detailed innovation strategy for the upcoming year. In a meantime, the excitement around the New Year is a perfect atmosphere to motivate all your employees to be more innovative in the next year. Your employees with their knowledge, expertise and experience can really make a positive impact on your business, so we recommend to make a hard copies or posters of our second checklist and give it to all your employees. There is no better way to start new year with a simple and fun exercise “Everyday Innovation Checklist”, don’t you think?

Let’s face it, innovation success is not going to happen overnight, not even on the New Year’s Eve. Nevertheless, it is a New Year, a new beginning, a fresh start. If you’re in charge of leading innovation in your company, not only you have to plan a detailed innovation strategy for the next year, but you also have to create a working atmosphere that encourages and motivates employees to be more involved in the innovation process.
And for those looking to keep their sustainability hat on before they return to the office in 2019, reserve your seat to see new and improved Innovation Cloud Enterprise.

Happy New Year and cheers to the next!
Your IC Team