The cost of innovation is not as high as most people think. Innovation doesn’t have to be expensive. In fact in most cases you can innovate on a very small budget; all you need the right mindset. No company should ever exclude itself from innovation due to cost. At a basic level every company can afford to innovate and probably can’t afford not to.

Let’s take a moment to break it down.

First, the goal of innovation is improvement: improving productivity, profitability, sustainability, etc. When an innovation reaches its goal you have a return on your investment. But what is the cost of that investment?

The cost of innovation is time. If you’re a leader in your organization you need to invest one hour each week thinking about innovation. Generate ideas and rough implementations. Then pass the ideas with potential on to your team to flush out. Let your team spend one hour each week with the ideas you pass on. Then have your team check the feasibility of the ideas that continue to show promise.

Finally, factor in the cost of developing the idea, the risks involved, and the potential return on that investment. At this point you’ve invested a few hours in ideas that you have thrown out and a few more hours on ideas that have real potential. What has this cost you so far? Keep in mind that you haven’t spent the anything on development.

Stay competitive! Invest one hour a week on innovation. It won’t break the bank, and you do have the time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 3:32 am and is filed under Innovation Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.