It’s the Little Things

  Innovation   Manufacturing   Strategy   ProjectsAtWork  

When it comes to innovation, many organizations seek the big, sexy, paradigm-shattering new idea. But smaller innovations can be just as important as the market-disrupting kind — maybe even better. Here are seven reasons why, and five examples of small initiatives that can be hugely powerful.

To stay relevant these days, your company must innovate or die. For many leaders, scarier words have never been spoken. But it might take the pressure off to realize the “I-word” doesn’t necessarily mean what you think. An innovation doesn’t have to be a hot new product worthy of Steve Jobs or a Eureka! moment that transforms your company.

Setting your sights on achieving a steady stream of tiny incremental innovations can be an incredibly powerful approach, says Patrick Stroh, author of Advancing Innovation: Galvanizing, Enabling & Measuring for Innovation Value! (Institute of Management Accountants, 2015). “It’s easy to be intimidated if you believe you must constantly come up with big, market-disrupting inventions,” Stroh says. “This mindset can paralyze you or, conversely, send you down a costly wrong path.”

The truth is, an innovation can be a revamped business process or a tweak to a manufacturing technique or a change in the way you work with a supplier — as long as it adds to customer value, it counts. Better to…

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