I recently started the course, Innovation & Entrepreneurship – From Basics to Open Innovation on Coursera Inc. by the EIT Digital, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley Faculty, and it opened my eyes to the interconnection between entrepreneurial thinking and innovation.
Today’s marketing landscape heavily relies on innovation to achieve a competitive advantage. As business leaders, we must constantly look for new ingenious ways because you can’t solve many problems with old solutions. This course by EIT Digital teaches you how to think like an entrepreneur and provides you with the models, tools, and frameworks to further develop your business or idea.
Innovation, the introduction of something new, is at the heart of entrepreneurship and has become very critical across all industries; however, it is essential to avoid using it as a buzzword and take time to thoroughly understand the innovation process.
Simply put: innovation is the development of a new solution or new way of doing something that drives differentiation versus the existing offerings versus your competitors while creating measurable value. Adding that value is a crucial element of innovation; otherwise, it is just an idea. So you’re looking for those essential elements when it comes to innovation.
"Innovation is the development of a new solution or new way of doing something that drives differentiation versus the existing offerings versus your competitors and creates measurable value."
On the other hand, entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is typically encountered in starting a business, which may include values other than economic ones.
Where do these two intersect? Entrepreneurs pursue opportunities, often, but not always, based on innovation, without regard to the resources directly and currently controlled by them. From an entrepreneurial perspective, starting a business, especially a technology business, may never have been easier than it is now. Fantastic ideas, access to capital, access to markets, much faster cycle time when we talk about creating products, and beautiful resources.
"The result of innovation should always be an improvement"
For those fantastic ideas to be innovative, they must also be helpful. Creative ideas alone don’t always lead to innovations because they don’t necessarily produce viable solutions to problems. Why should we then innovate? Because if we’re going to create positive change, we have to have repeatable, sustainable, and communicable ways to share our thinking, which is the best way to drive sustainable innovation.
In general, the result of innovation should always be an improvement. From society’s perspective, the tangible outcomes of innovation are economic growth, increased well-being and communication, educational accessibility, and environmental sustainability.
So to budding entrepreneurs looking to disrupt the status quo, we need to take a look to see which incumbents are not innovating fast enough, are not seeing the next trend, or are not adopting new technologies. There lies the opportunity; in most cases, Innovation is the core reason for modern existence.
Fágbèmí Ọ̀ṣìnúgà
Article was first published on my personal website www.enuwodu.com under the title Why innovate?. Kindly share this article with your network if you enjoyed it.
