Understanding and using innovation in printing businesses will become an important focus for Printing Industries' industry engagement following a successful round of forums in cities around Australia which ended last week.
The Printing Industries’ ‘Innovate or Stagnate series sponsored by Media Super featured speakers from the acclaimed Hargraves Institute.
Speaking at the Sydney forum, Alan Ryan executive director of the Hargraves Institute said companies could not continue to do what they did 10 years ago and expect to be successful.
He also cautioned against relying solely on technology for an ongoing solution, saying, “It doesn’t matter how successful you are, technology comes and goes.
“The world is changing and unless you change too, you will be left behind. One of the best ways to innovate is to perfect someone else’s ideas – there’s no need to invent anything or even invest – just take the idea and do it better.”
Ryan divided innovation into 10 types:
The business model – how you make money
Networks and alliances – how you join forces with other companies for mutual benefit
Enabling process – how you support the company’s core processes and workers
Core processes – how you create and add value to your offerings
Product performance – how you design your core offerings
Product system – how you link and/or provide a platform for multiple products
Service – how you provide value to customers and consumers beyond and around your products.
Channel – how you get your offerings to market
Brand – how you communicate your offerings
Customer experience – how your customers feel when they interact with your company and its offerings.
He advised companies to examine theses areas, reject what they considered irrelevant to them, select what is relevant and then do something about it.
Ryan said innovative companies needed to have multiple projects running all of which were focussed on getting them where they wanted to be.
He says, “If you have multiple projects and one fails, that’s okay because you have others running. Smaller projects cost less and are easier to manage than big projects until you get the experience to run bigger projects.
“Always remember that from little things, big things grow.”
Printing Industries is currently discussing the next development phase with the Institute to assist companies go forward with innovation.
