At the first inaugural Richard E. Jenkins Innovation Lecture Series, Louis Foreman spoke on bringing all of your companies resources to bear on innovation.
Louis shared his business background, from large textile manufacturing to a lacrosse equipment business run out of his fraternity room, built out of pure hustle.
Innovation focuses on building around your core business. It is not refreshing a product with incremental changes. It is a money-making venture forged through the presence of the right culture, resources, realistic expectations, and the right people. In most cases the lack of innovation success can be tied to a lack of execution. Ideas are cheap, executed innovation has value. Ideas that enable differentiation from competitors, that avoid commoditization, and that appropriately manage the risk/reward equation are the definition of innovation when appropriately executed.
Louis encouraged participants to utilize the resources of open innovation platforms, as well as crowd sourcing ideas where appropriate. Enventys worked with the charlotte observer to acquire and refine the ideas for improving non-profit efficiencies. Go outside of your organization, make sure your are talking with the right people – your customers are likely to have a better understanding of your products failures than anyone else.
Enventys.com is a company designed to partner with inventors to help bridge the gap between idea and execution. Enventys provides a full set of resources from engineering to marketing to bring to bear on delivering innovation into the marketplace. Overseeing multiple programs from Everyday Edisons, to Edison Nation and Inventors Digest, Enventys is positioned to be the partner for inventors who may be averse to the significant risk associated with executing an idea. Enventys offers programs for bringing an idea to market successfully, with no capital risk to the inventor, and a 50/50 split of revenue.
Apply these ideas to your job search. Create and execute to be succesful in targeting employment opportunities. Apply all of your resources to bear on solving the problem – value all your interactions for what they can teach you about the job search process.
Louis was an effective and inspirational speaker, it’s hard to capture all of the value and insight in these notes – consider attending related events to learn more about the value of innovation.
