Module 1 | Innovation, why is it important?

Business environments are always changing. Market needs are evolving and growing, stakeholder requirements may shift, or business resources may fluctuate throughout the year. New Zealand businesses that offer products need to innovate to keep their business thriving in such a complex and unsteady environment - and a strong innovation strategy will help with this. Successful product innovation shares three core characteristics across many companies. That being, doing product development right, doing the right product development, and reviewing this frequently to make adjustments to this procedure and to keep your innovation strategy strong, and on track. With this being said, this walkthrough framework will address three core areas/modules for creating successful innovation strategies.

Firstly, this guide explains how you can recognise and evaluate your business goals and values. This is important from a high level because it sets out the general direction for more depthful, tactical plans to be created to help guide your business’s innovation while keeping attention to your company's purpose. Here on, this framework will comment on creating market and industry focus areas and attack strategies that best suit your enterprises direction and aligns with your corporate purpose. Following on, a more depthful analysis of New Product Development (NPD) strategy will be outlined and explained. This will explain how to use different tools to aid in the creation of your innovation strategy. 

The second core area will explain how you can effectively manage your product portfolio within your enterprise. This will explain and analyse tools proven to be successful within literature as well as within a New Zealand enterprise environment. 

Finally, this framework will examine the purpose of monitoring product and company performance, and present useful tools that your enterprise can use to ‘close the innovation strategy loop’. and what success factors can you incorporate to help grow your business. This section will explain how to use different tools to aid the performance evaluation of your company so that finding areas to improve on is easy and clear, and future strategic goals can start to be conceptualised.