Your company needs innovation management because innovation management is key to being a successful company. Underneath all of the buzzwords and startup excitement, innovation management just means to develop new products and services in a conscious and directed way. And having a healthy process where your company innovates is key to getting on top and staying on top in the market.
This is true because the market is always changing. Your products can’t stay the same because the markets do not stay the same; if your product stays the same and the market changes, a gulf grows between them – a gulf that represents lost sales.
Technology changes, people age and children grow up – all of which results in a different usage pattern of products in almost ten years or less. That’s an incredibly quick pace to be developing, using, and retiring product lines, but if your company’s pace is slower you risk getting left behind. Getting left behind, in this case, means making less money since less people are buying.
There are plenty of examples of companies who didn’t think this was true throughout history. One of the apocryphal ones is that of the buggy whip makers in the time of the Ford; now, we call products that are after their time “buggy whips.” Sometimes buggy whips can continue as much smaller companies, but sometimes buggy whip makers have to throw in the towel. Blockbuster and Borders are painful examples of this; Blockbuster now maintains a much smaller operation in rural towns serving market laggards, and Borders has went under altogether.
So in order to continue being a profitable organization, or even gain some market share, your company needs to unlock innovation management. This means that your company needs to build a repeatable, measureable process that turns out innovations and improvements to current products. This way, your company can keep releasing new products and services, and keep up with the market.