Innovation is about creating value and increasing efficiency, and therefore, growing your business. It is a spark that keeps organizations and people moving onward and upward. Without innovation, new products, new services, and new business models would never emerge, and most organizations would be forever stuck doing the same old things the same old way.

‘Innovation’ is simply doing things differently, so that the outcome of your work is faster and better. Initiative, persistence, creativity and pro-activeness are basic ingredients of “innovation”. Transforming a good idea into reality can be painful. But searching for that idea isn’t…..it’s fun!

And everyone can play the game. Innovation is about transforming ideas into a product or service that the world needs – and having fun while we’re at it. It’s that simple.

Every organization wants innovation – the big buzzword in their strategy, because successful innovation creates value. The result: suddenly everyone is innovating! Or at least everyone thinks they are innovating. But are they really?

If you innovate in the wrong way, you can end up running around like a headless chicken, surprised each time that all your great ideas don’t develop into fortunes. If your aim is not well defined from the start, the process ends up being hard and expensive, instead of fun and playful.

One needs to ask some tough questions before one can start the ‘innovation’ process. What do you expect from innovation? What are the success criteria? What is the big dream that you hope innovation can realise for you? A failure to ask these questions and take an honest approach towards innovation, can lead to all your good ideas collapsing. To do real innovation, you need to start right. Ask the questions. Define why you want to innovate and create a culture in the organization from top to bottom. Innovation should be a way of thinking and dreaming that all employees are comfortable expressing. With this organizational culture, ideas will grow and radical changes will take place in the organization competences, technology and resources. To embrace these radical changes, you must be ready to stray from your normal path and head into totally new areas of business. True innovation brings radical change. Innovation should be a fun and playful experience. But if the organization is not ready to take that deep dive into innovation, it will not be a journey of joy, but one of frustration.

So before you invest more time in innovation, ask yourself why you want to innovate. If the answer is ‘new business opportunities’, you are ready for the journey. But if the answer is ‘competitive advantage in core business’ or ‘increased market share’, there are many more effective ways of achieving this, and innovation may not be one of them.

Innovation is both, an art and a science. It is an art because it involves leadership skills that get humans to think and act beyond what they would normally do. It is a science, because it is complex and revolves around several factors in order to succeed. Those organizations that can combine the art and science in a process based and humanistic approach – are on to a winning concept.

Innovation is that new winning concept. It is multi-functional – it involves many departments whether they are Sales, Marketing, Operations, R&D, Finance, Procurement or HR.

It is important to note that innovation is sometimes confused with creativity and invention: Creativity is the aspect of coming up with new thoughts and ideas, whereas invention is the aspect of creating something new. But innovation is the successful commercialization or value gain of a creative concept or an invention.

In the Retail industry, innovations and changes are starting to happen as retail chains employ technology to deliver a smoother shopping experience. Take for instance the shopping carts with scanners that Shoppers Stop claims to have deployed at HYPERCITY. These let shoppers scan the goods they are purchasing before they reach the counter, thus saving valuable time. There are other such innovations being tested abroad and rest assured, they’ll land up in India, sooner than later. One such idea is “Veggie Vision”, a gadget from IBM that identifies fruit and vegetables using a camera, doing away with the need to punch in a numeric code while weighing produce.

At the back-end there’s a significant presence of IT in Indian retail—be it CRM for loyalty programs and personalised service or ERP to run a retail chain’s operations. There’s a lot more that technology can contribute to making shopping a pleasurable experience.

…it’s time for us to Innovate!