Collaboration in Innovation
Today, innovation has become key to a company’s growth. Companies need to be more creative to gain a competitive advantage in an evolving market where accelerating startups make top line growth a difficult goal. It is important to turn innovation from a buzzword to reality and a principal medium is through collaboration. Here are five key reasons why collaboration is important in innovation:
- Inspiration
- Time saved
- Perspective
- Connections
- Acquiring funding
- Inspiration: An innovator may conceive a portion of an idea and not be able to move forward. However, combining their half of the idea with another’s idea could result in a creative solution. Ideas need to mingle and create new forms. A key driver of innovation is the ability to exchange ideas and gain inspiration. Someone else might have a missing piece of the information to the idea an innovator is working on.
- Time saved: Collaborative feedback received reduces the number of iterations performed on a solution. Collaboration with others can speed up the chains of connected ideas that result in something innovative.
- Perspectives: As innovators iterate on an idea, feedback received from fellow colleagues with a different expertise provides a different point of view to the solution. Problems are better defined when individuals from different backgrounds and with unique skill sets work together. When people with different ideas are brought together, the diverse views and life experiences spur new and creative ideas, creating a joint momentum for change.
- Making connections: It is important to use one’s network. Connecting the dots between members by getting innovators in touch with other coworkers with beneficial resources creates an effective and innovative workplace. It also fosters mutually beneficial relationships.
- Funding: The lack of funds presents a big roadblock to creative ideas turning into innovative solutions. By fostering connections and developing networking skills within the organization, innovators can identify partners and sponsors to obtain funding for their projects. This is particularly important in a coworking space, where many innovators are generally starting out and need to get their ideas off the ground.
Collaboration helps innovators arrive at the best version of their ideas and helps see them through to implementation. With experience in managing large programs, Satori can help structure innovation centers of excellence and innovation programs to manage end-to-end generation and implementation of new ideas.