CEO’s Message

“Ready, Aim, Aim, Aim, Fire: don’t stay too long just aiming! You’ll have to fire someday! Companies spend to much time just aiming at innovation!”

We are still in the middle of a global financial and economic crisis, where the worst is not gone yet. These tough economic times can highlight previously hidden problems or cause old problems to intensify. Small problems in booming times become make-or-break issues, as money gets tighter. Achieving business success does not get any easier.

But the economic crisis can actually provide an innovation platform to generate good results. Loss of revenue and profit can make you bleed and you need to stop that first, instilling a cost cutting mentality, which is not good for innovation. Then, however, a phase starts where leaders ask which parts of their business model are weak (and perhaps unsustainable) and that, in turn, can lead to restructuring and reinvention.

As such, enhancing innovation ability is now seen, by most leaders, as the most important lever to guarantee future profitability and growth. However, innovation can prove challenging for even the most talented teams. This is why in many organizations ambitious achievements are asked for, but they lack the innovation skills and experience needed to succeed. Too much time and money has been wasted to follow fatally flawed innovation strategies and fancy innovation projects for too long.

 
As a good innovation performance does not happen by accident, questions are:
 
…how do you make it happen when you’ve already been doing your best?
…how to explore the “next practices” when the Best Practices are already fully used?
 
You need to change the approach you are using, to make innovation real. It is recommended that executives start their innovation initiatives by making them “Sexy yet effective” by applying it on real problems and projects, where growth is a key issue, not as a stand-alone exercise.
 
That’s where we can help you: to transform your business through innovation, making it work for you. Engage us as a trusted partner. This way you can rapidly demonstrate success.
 
Organizations pay a lot of attention to the cost of doing something. They should be more concerned with the costs of doing nothing. I clearly recommend you to be proactive and embrace that change instead of being reactive and suffer from it. The longer you wait to begin innovating, the worse things will get. An opportunity without execution remains a dream and execution without focus is just a waste of time.

Paulo Janeiro Inogate’s CEO