Jumpstarting Innovation: Innovation does not need to be expensive

Business today is far from ”business as usual” owing to an ever-changing business landscape that is chaotic, fragmented, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. Traditional marketing based on a market-driven customer orientation is failing to propel organizations to maintain a competitive advantage needed to succeed. Successful enterprises are now reinventing themselves and changing from a formulated marketing approach to a marketing that is inclined towards entrepreneurship whereby an organization re-ignites an ‘entrepreneurial spirit and actions that made them successful in the first place. This has led to the rise of the entrepreneurial marketing approach.

Marketing practice is now a more innovation-oriented kind of marketing that is based on intuition, informality and speed of decision-making in regard to assessing new ideas and responding to market needs just like entrepreneurs do and act.  Entrepreneurial marketing  helps organizations to become innovative by quickly identifying and exploring opportunities that can lead to the development of innovative products that can help to satisfy and retain  profitable customers.

Innovative organizations are also internally characterized by an organizational culture and climate that supports innovative ideas and enables the realization of such ideas into value-adding products and services.

Partnerships are also  becoming popular among innovative organizations. Innovative organization in the healthcare industry  are currently   going up the road of partnerships.  For example, Family Planning Association of Malawi (FPAM) one of the ticking organizations in Malawi’s healthcare  sector has strategic  vertical alliances with Government  of Malawi and  horizontal partnerships with  players in the same industry such  Banja La Mtsogolo, Population Services International-Malawi, private clinics.  Partnerships with direct or indirect competitors have recently proven to be good for innovation and hence good for business.

The big question that  marketing managers ask  on  jump starting innovation is to “have a separate innovation department or not to?”  If the process of idea generation  for an  organizations  entails  waiting for the Annual General Meeting to solicit new ideas from its Departments , and there organization  has no channel of harnessing these and further exploring the ones with the potential to become the organization’s next innovative service or project, chances are that organization will not  see much innovation. 

Innovation does not have to be expensive.  To leverage on limited resources and the available assets and expertise of others in the external environment,  an organizations’s first innovation projects could be done collaboratively with others players in these networks. Before collaborating with others, it is imperative to consider  aspects such as  establishing whether these potential innovations are in line with the core business and the expected benefits and  responsibilities of the collaborating partners as well as  keeping  track of whether the collaborative innovation projects are being effective or not by testing their effectiveness in small ways.

Marketing experts  recommend  that  every marketing function should work towards developing and embedding innovation into their  organizational culture. This can be done through longer term strategic planning such as the development of innovation programmes, hiring or allocating innovation manager and short term strategy such us setting up project-based collaborative partnerships with entrepreneurs to facilitate learning from newer and entrepreneurial firms.

Collaborative innovation partnerships or networks such as co-creating with customers and experts through online forums of innovation networks such as HealthEnabled Africa can help health sector organizations to attain new business leads, to learn about new opportunities to collaborate on projects as well as to gain intellectual exchange among other benefits.

 Further, organizations needs to work at improving customer relationships so that they  can derive customer insights and adapt innovations quickly to their needs.