WESTERN GOVERNORS UNIVERSITY
Developing Your Innovation Skills
Innovation Skills
The world today is filled with disruptions. Organizations need to be innovative to adapt and respond to constant interferences and uncertain situations. Employing individuals with innovation skills is becoming increasingly important for businesses looking to solve problems, create value, and edge out the competition.
Innovation skills are important in developing products, improving processes, enhancing customer experience, and designing better marketing campaigns. Cultivating innovation skills helps you find creative ways of solving problems, adapt to challenging situations, and have a competitive advantage in fields like business, academia, and healthcare.
This guide will highlight innovation skills, why they matter, their benefits, and how you can learn and use them in the workplace.
What Are Innovation Skills?
Innovation skills refer to the expertise and abilities required to generate, develop, and implement creative solutions that adapt or respond to the disruptions in the world of business. These skills may involve analyzing an underlying problem and working to create a viable solution. For example, you can analyze consumer behavior and purchasing patterns to design a new product that meets your customer’s unique tastes and preferences.
Innovation means developing new ideas or reengineering existing ideas to create value, adapt to change, or improve process efficiency to attain defined results. Innovation can be used to turn a business’ weaknesses into money-making opportunities.
Why Are Innovation Skills Important?
Innovation skills are integral in reviewing the business environment and designing or enhancing products or services to solve underlying problems. Individuals with innovation skills can study the demographics of a target market and create products, services, and marketing campaigns that resonate with the target group.
Innovation skills can help you achieve the following:
- Develop creative solutions: As an innovator, you can leverage divergent (generating possible ideas to solve a problem) and convergent (shortlisting the ideas) thinking to design solutions to existing challenges. For example, identifying a problem within your community and developing a product that addresses it.
- Streamline your workflows: You can design new procedures to automate repetitive tasks. You can also allocate more resources to critical departments of a business or collaborate with teams to improve efficiency, save resources, and focus on areas that need a human touch.
- Grow your business: You can develop or enhance a product/service to penetrate or expand a market and increase revenue. This may include investing in customer acquisition, expanding the product/service line, and opening new locations in areas with potential consumers.
- Contribute to technological integration: You can analyze and resolve current technological needs within your organization. For example, this could mean looking at viable technology options and shortlisting those that fit your budget and easily integrate with your business system. Technological integration helps you automate tasks, improve customer relationships, communicate effectively, and increase productivity.
What Are the Benefits of Having Innovation Skills?
Businesses and organizations rely on innovative individuals to solve problems, improve products, find new markets, and increase profitability. Developing these skills enhances your appeal to employers because you bring fresh perspectives and creative solutions.
Below are the benefits of developing innovation skills:
- Increased creative recognition: Creating a solution that adds value, improves efficiency and productivity, and increases a business’s sales and profitability sets you apart for recognition. For example, Steve Jobs is recognized for taking calligraphy classes and leveraging that knowledge to develop fonts used on Apple Mac.
- Problem-solving excellence: You can analyze an underlying problem, formulate viable ideas to resolve it, and run and validate trial experiments. This may include identifying obstacles hindering the maximum productivity of an organization or providing guidelines on how to adapt to a certain change.
- Intrapreneurial roles: Innovation skills encourage idea generation. You can identify market gaps, emerging trends, underserved niches, and generate new ideas to address unmet needs. You can also create prototypes, test new ideas, and produce business models that can be replicated and scaled to new markets.
- Enhanced performance reviews: With innovation skills, you demonstrate exceptional problem-solving abilities and creative idea generation. You’re also adaptable to changes in the workplace. This can set you apart in performance reviews and lead to more positive evaluations with new opportunities with higher salaries.
- Project leadership: Since you’re proactive in identifying opportunities and solving problems, you’re likely to be trusted to lead a team working on a new project within your organization. As a project leader, you can plan, schedule, monitor, and coordinate all project activities, including budgeting and keeping key stakeholders informed on the project's progress.
Examples of Innovation Skills in the Workplace
Innovation helps companies adapt to change, have a competitive advantage, streamline workflows, and develop or improve products. With innovation skills, you can help businesses to increase productivity, expand product lines, and maximize profitability.
Here are examples of how you can use innovation skills in the workplace:
Product Development and Enhancement
Product developers can analyze the real-time performance of a product or market dynamics and develop or improve it to meet market requirements. For instance, entrepreneurs can study consumer tastes, preferences, and purchasing patterns to develop a product that effectively meets the demands of the target market.
Process Improvement
Businesses can encourage employees to identify inefficiencies and bottlenecks and offer a fresh perspective. They can also streamline workflows and enhance productivity. For example, embracing technology and automation reduces manual tasks, resulting in continuous process refinement and better overall operational performance.
Innovative Marketing Campaigns
Digital marketers can study the target audience's needs, preferred social platform, and user activity. Innovation can help marketers design creative marketing campaigns that resonate with the target group to improve conversion rates.
Customer Experience Enhancement
Customers are the lifeblood of a business. Organizations can enhance customer experience by auditing their customer touchpoints to establish what their customers go through–from visiting a website to placing an order to receiving the products. Customer audits can help personalize customer interactions and allocate resources to support teams to respond quickly to customers’ queries and feedback.
Environmental Sustainability Initiatives
Organizations can use innovation skills to create conditions that favor the environment. This may include implementing initiatives that prevent environmental pollution like using green energy, reusing and recycling materials, reducing packaging, using nontoxic substances, and streamlining workflows to reduce emissions.
How Can I Use Innovation Skills?
The business world faces constant disruptions, creating a high demand for innovation skills. Businesses need to create solutions to elemental problems like decreased customer satisfaction, business productivity, and climate change.
- Implementing innovative business strategies: Project managers can oversee the planning, scheduling, implementation, and monitoring of a new project within their organization. For example, they can implement an automated billing and invoicing project to get timely and accurate financial reporting.
- Developing software for businesses: Software developers can design high-performing software solutions and improve the performance of the current technologies. With user research, they can help companies create intuitive interfaces and implement interactions that enhance user engagement and satisfaction.
- Creating innovative marketing campaigns: Digital marketing specialists can use data analytics to identify new market segments and create marketing strategies that capture audience’s attention. They can also experiment with emerging digital platforms to reach customers ingeniously.
- Starting a business: Entrepreneurs can create new business models that add value to existing markets. They’ll constantly seek opportunities for improvement and investment within their area of expertise.
- Developing creative sales solutions: Sales managers can develop unique value propositions tailored to specific customers and engage them in a new way. Managers can also collaborate with product teams to create pioneering solutions that address client challenges.
How Can I Learn Innovation Skills?
We offer different degree programs that equip you with the ability to identify business problems and create viable solutions. You’ll be empowered to identify opportunities, solve complex challenges, and contribute meaningfully to diverse fields.
Some of the degree programs you can enroll in to learn innovation skills include a B.S. in Finance, a B.S. in Marketing, a B.S. in HR, a B.S. in IT Management, a B.S. in Business Management, and a B.S. in Healthcare Administration.
With these degree programs, you'll be able to:
- Create initiatives to improve existing systems.
- Collaborate to develop solutions to challenges that will increase healthcare quality and improve patient outcomes.
- Implement innovative business strategies.
- Identify existing connections among ideas or solutions.
- Identify an area where a novel approach is needed.
You can also learn innovation skills by attending innovative seminars, events, webinars, workshops, reading books and whitepapers, or competing in innovation-related hackathons.
Frequently Asked Questions
You can learn and develop innovation skills by finding an ideal degree program at WGU's School of Business. You can also practice creative thinking by engaging in brainstorming sessions and liking seemingly unrelated concepts to generate new ideas.
Developing innovation skills requires constant curiosity, embracing failure and adapting to long-term changes.
You can apply innovation skills in your career by developing or improving a product, identifying areas that need novel approaches, and creating environmental sustainability initiatives.
You can learn innovation skills by reading books and whitepapers, participating in hackathons, or attending innovation events, workshops, and seminars. However, formal training, such as a degree program, is preferred since you’ll acquire diverse strategies and ways to be innovative.
