What is an innovation sandwich?

My friend Sinead Mac Manus of 8 fold invited me to contribute to an event on Womens Enterprise Day – part of Global Entrepreneurship Week. I’m going to give a brief talk on innovation and enterprise development. In planning the talk I collected three main themes that have re-occurred in my client engagements and my own project development: creating room for innovation when developing the vision, focusing on customers when designing a business, and building a foundation and culture for innovation.  By the time I had sketched the outline for my talk, it looked like an innovation sandwich.

When I’m working with clients and collaborators, we start with an idea and develop the vision. I encourage people to make room for randomness and take the limits off. In developing our ideas, it is helpful to have the space to be creative, to think the unthinkable. We start to describe the direction in which we want to head. We need to make room and clear a space for innovation.

Once we have this sense of direction we can start to design a viable business model. The vision we articulate should have a customer in mind and the value proposed by the business or enterprise should meet a customer need or demand. In my talk I’ll be focusing on customer discovery and development, give examples of what this looks like in real life, and connect this with financial planning and strategy.

I’ve been thinking about where and when people innovate. Often there is a solid foundation from which innovation can happen. It’s useful to think about building this foundation into your business model and plans. I’ll give some evidence of where this is happening. A culture of innovation is just as important for established enterprises as it is for new and growing businesses. Making room for and support innovation is important so that we can be proactive and nimble in an environment of change and uncertainty.

So there’s an innovation sandwich. It starts with innovation, from which enterprise develops, and we continue to make room for innovation. Come along on 17 November or get in contact for more information on innovation and enterprise development.