Your business’s innovation strategy is a major player in the game when it comes to transforming your organization from that of a newcomer to an established organization. Constant innovation ensures your company remains proactive rather than reactive, unleashing your company’s potential as a whole. Your company’s innovation strategy should grow with your organization. Below are three ways to scale your business’s innovation strategy effectively.

Build a Network of Innovation

Building an expansive innovation network is part of developing a successful innovation strategy. An empowered innovation network can impact your company both internally and externally. On the inside, your company can foster innovation by way of a culture that has been developed to be richly rooted in customer empathy. This can result in employees working hard to solve difficult problems faced by customers, which makes innovation more powerful. When a company nurtures an expansive innovation culture, employees within are also better able to recognize problems and to innovate to solve them. 

On the outside, your organization is able to participate in innovation systems made up of suppliers, partners, competitors and customers, which allow your organization to share resources and knowledge to solve more complex problems while adding value to your customers and the industry as a whole. 

Develop Systems and Processes That Stand

Systems and processes are often looked at last at scaling companies and are only considered when it becomes absolutely necessary. But this creates a problem – when strong processes are only developed when they absolutely must be is that the systems are not as effective or well thought out. When a company is not racing to come up with strong processes, more effective and well thought out results will inevitably flow. This is important when it comes to innovation strategy because a strong support system is vital when it comes to organizing innovations and tracking successes.

By focusing on developing systems and processes that stand, the creation, execution, development, and measurement of ideas are all addressed. By developing strong systems and processes, you are effectively building the backbone for your innovation strategy to grow on.

Constant Evaluation

One of the greatest components of scaling any strategy is continual review and measurement of your progress, including your innovation strategy. Be certain to insert regular analyses and use mechanisms for collecting and evaluating your business’s data. This is also called benchmarking. Benchmarking your innovations and their successes (or failures) can measure your innovation sales or usage as well as the percent of employees’ time and other metrics that will shed light on the performance of an innovation. 

Measure regularly so you can see which pieces of your innovation strategy work best so you can replicate it easily. As your company scales, your innovation strategy should scale as well to remain competitive and to sustain benefits. An adequate innovation strategy can encourage the ideation and development of important assets that will inevitably drive value.