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Innovation, the cornerstone of lasting success, is as much about mindset as it is about creativity. Companies that have realized this have imprinted it on their methodologies and bloomed, like Amazon, now renowned for its try-fail-learn innovative culture. But with business strategies and company practices already in place, what business innovation mindset strategies can you use to make room for parallel innovation?
We have answers in this episode of the Women’s Leadership Success podcast focused on career and business innovation mindset strategies for women.
- Why is innovation an essential factor in organizational culture? How do you cultivate an innovative company culture?
- What must you know about the realities of innovating to develop products that help people?
- Why do we need more women in business? What can female entrepreneurs do to increase their odds of success?
- What are some business innovation mindset strategies?
- How do you cultivate a problem-solving mindset? How does it help in creating an innovative company culture?
Lorrain Marchand: Author
In this episode of Women’s Leadership Success, Sabrina Braham interviews Lorraine Marchand, author of The Innovation Mindset: Eight Essential Steps to Transform Any Industry, a powerful book condensing three decades of her experience in new product development. Her book explores the realities of the different stages of product development and the determining factors in developing a product that the customer needs. Today’s conversation gets underneath the importance and power of innovation in business, developing business innovation mindset strategies, cultivating a problem-solving mindset, and increasing the odds of success for women entrepreneurs.
Lorraine Marchand’s Interview on Developing The Innovation Mindset For Women
Lorraine Marchand is a business leader, advisor and innovator in the life sciences and healthcare. Her teaching, consulting and business endeavors focus on developing new products and services and the business and marketing models that enable their successful adoption. Her ??goal is to enable innovation and entrepreneurship to help create an ecosystem where female leaders can get the resources they need to be successful.
Developing The Innovation Mindset In Women Entrepreneurs: Women’s Leadership #117 Show Notes
- Background in corporate intrapreneurship and smaller company entrepreneurship + the enthusiasm to ideate and introduce new products and services [00:47-02:04]
- How Lorraine’s dad introduced an exercise to infuse a problem-solving and innovation mindset in her since 13 years old [02:19-05:21]
- Why do a lot of people lack an innovative mindset? How can they develop it? [05:31-08:09]
- The three things necessary to cultivate an innovative mindset [08:15-10:31]
- Leaving room for out-of-the-box thinking, problem-identification and solving, and exploring interests other than work [10:33-13:20]
- The process of generating ideas [13:31-17:00]
- The story of Sarah Apgar, who ideated and created a piece of fitness equipment from a thing she made at the fire station, and how she raised $250,000 on Shark Tank for it [17:14-19:12]
- Innovations and inventions during COVID [19:12-22:47]
- How do you know when to pivot in life? + Real-life examples of famous companies that birthed from business strategy pivots [22:59-24:44]
- How can female entrepreneurs increase their odds of success? [24:46-29:09]
- Women represent only around 7% of venture capitalists. Why is that a problem and what can be done to help women improve their financial competency? [29:20-32:07]
- Lorraine’s last piece of advice for you [32:12-32:54]
Women’s Leadership Success #117 Summary: Developing The Innovation Mindset
Episode notes to leave with:
- Problem-solving lies at the heart of innovation. It is one of the three components that make up the innovation mindset; the other two are insatiable curiosity and the embracing of change.
- Corporations can balance their company culture and still make space for innovation by encouraging curiosity, a problem-solving mindset, and welcoming change.
- Innovation also demands a disconnect from the demanding everyday routine. Sparing time to reflect on the problems and situations and the solutions and steps taken towards them helps make room for new thoughts and ideas.
- The process of generating new ideas starts with defining a solid problem statement. This is made possible by being observant about the problems around us – in the workplace, school, neighborhood, home, and every sphere of life. Observation is the beginning of ideation in the innovation process.
- Journaling could help you generate new ideas. A lesson passed on by her father, Lorraine Marchand, writes down three problems she observes in her life every day in her journal. This helps her look back at them at different points, and something out of those occasionally floats into the work she needs to do.
- Identifying the problem also involves asking the right questions: What is the problem? Who is experiencing it? What is significant about it? What pain is it causing?
- When identifying the right solution to your problem, you often have to come to three different solutions to evaluate against each other. What follows is choosing the best solution. Clearly, you have to use a brainstorming methodology to land the different ideas and undergo a selection process to narrow down from many to one.
- Many renowned companies pivoted from their original idea to compound their success and growth over time. Some examples of companies that did the pivoting include Netflix, PayPal, and YouTube.
- Amazon is world-renowned for its innovative culture of work. They encourage people to try, fail, and learn from their mistakes.
- One secret to entrepreneurial success is moving fearlessly forward. Make a calculated bet, but if you know you have to do it, then do it. Seek help, get out there, and make a move.
Business Innovation Mindset Strategies 101: Increase Your Odds Of Success As a Female Entrepreneur
To increase your odds of success:
- De-risk your technology to eliminate any technical errors. Have the right market intelligence, understand your competition, and do regular customer research because your solution has to be what the market needs at any particular time.
- De-risk financially. An entrepreneur needs to raise capital in a way that keeps their company running for a significant period. To de-risk financially, de-risk from an operational standpoint. Have a solid handle on your business operations, and bring in the right talent, processes, workflows, systems and management.
Action for Traction: Business Innovation Mindset Strategies
Listening to a podcast or reading Lorraine’s book is a good start. But the way you will change and grow yourself is to take a small action every time you have an aha from what you have heard or read.
Here are three possible actions you might consider:
1: Keep a journal of problems that you notice.
2: Get a group together and brainstorm the problem.
- Defer judgment
- Generate ideas quickly
- No explanations. Keep the ideas coming
3: Brainstorm three solutions.
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