"Our business model is the same as the Beatles. Guys with weaknesses that they made up for each other." - Steve Jobs
Separate the daily business from the implementation of innovations. After all, you don't yet know which project and how it will succeed. I have had excellent experiences with self-organised and interdisciplinary teams and am an advocate of agile project management. Especially when it comes to steering a ship through uncertain waters.
Do not define a fixed work plan, but goals and let the teams define the sub-steps themselves. Sub-steps that are tested, evaluated and adapted again and again.
Mix professional qualifications from different departments. Do not take the staff completely out of the day-to-day business. This has the side effect of keeping the projects in dialogue with the goals of the specialist departments. As a priority, give the people who will work with it the opportunity to take care of it themselves.
Project teams with flat hierarchies and versatile qualifications produce good results the fastest. This goes hand in hand with a shift in decision-making authority. Teams do not decide according to hierarchical aspects, but according to expertise and situational knowledge.
Although I am in favour of many novel methods, I am not a dogmatist. If you are not a start-up where all employees are owners and all work on one project, then you have to steer the teams towards the vision somehow. Bottom-up impulses are good, but they have to be integrated top-down.
Methodologies like Kanban, Scrum but also Waterfall have good approaches. Take the tool that is suitable for the situation. For top-down management, you cannot avoid milestones, phases with goals. Goals give the teams orientation. The way they achieve these goals is defined by the teams themselves. This makes them complicit. Small units are better able to generate cooperation and are more likely to act according to an entrepreneurial intelligence.
The biggest risk of innovation is still building something that nobody needs. Many employees spend far too much time building a product in isolation without really knowing if the market will even want this thing.
An MVP can also be a prototype of your product or even just a smoke test . A smoke test is when companies pretend the product is available. They create videos, product presentations and have people put on a waiting list. Without an effective sale, this is a way to find out if there is interest.
Nevertheless, you won't hit the jackpot the first time, keep reorienting yourself. Amazon started out selling books, today it is one of the largest IT service providers in the world. Netflix was an online video store. Today it is one of the largest media companies in the world.
If you simply copy the competition, then you will never fully understand how to create a market proposition from a trend. Keep an eye on technological developments. Because ultimately, you want to create advantages for yourself.
When you create something, you have connected something that became obvious to you at some point. Creativity is just connecting things. Consistently follow stories and ideas about trends that could change customer behaviour. Sort them out and see if their application could improve the benefits in your offer.
