Which promising ideas can lead to new revenue or higher margins? What disruptive technologies or relevant developments are you facing? And what can or should you do to counter them? These are just a few questions that are important and relevant for companies.

Innovation at four levels

BDO approaches innovation at four different (and inextricably linked) levels: strategy, process, culture and product. In order to truly foster innovation, your perspective serves as the guideline. Where do you want your organisation to be one to three years from now? We then move on to focus on processes: what is needed to attain that perspective from a client’s view? The next step is assessing your corporate culture and the qualities of staff. Can we achieve the innovation targets with those resources or do we need new staff with extra knowledge and skills? The last step is defining your “physical” production process or product innovation.

In practice, it often becomes clear that businesses primarily focus on product and service improvement. Some do not even get to that, because of the day-to-day amount of work in progress. Our experience tells us that the better the preconditions for innovation are met, the better organisations are able to structure the first three levels of innovation (strategy, process and culture), and the stronger the basis for future innovations will be.

Moreover, with your business, you can benefit optimally from the government subsidies if you are clear on all four levels. On the basis of a quick review, BDO’s tax specialists can assess perfectly whether the tax schemes are in fact available to your business. You can read more about this on the WBSO page.

What is needed to inspire innovative ideas?

Innovation requires an explorative culture: a creative attitude, an outside-the-box mindset, a focus on the environment and an eye for opportunities. Seeing things that are going on in the world, that may disrupt your business and devising a new approach. Exploring suits start-ups. They focus on new ideas and they brainstorm to improve those ideas. They look at clients who may benefit from those ideas. They operate independently, they adapt well, they are quick to act and entrepreneurial. In a single word: they are agile.

Established companies are often stuck in their own “system”; the aggregate of procedures, arrangements, contracts and a culture of working hard. They focus on utilisation, taking advantage of production capacity, people, time schedules and machines. The promotion of innovation in an environment with a strong focus on maximum utilisation requires a true cultural change.

To give staff the freedom to use their brainpower and creativity to achieve innovation, we see a series of highly interrelated prerequisites, which are:

an innovation strategy, or at least a directive framework for innovation;
no management by control, but leadership;
staff with a set of duties, responsibilities with suitable powers;
investment in creative skills;
promotion of inspiration, information gathering and knowledge acquisition - and sharing this, also externally; and
use of an innovation process with suitable KPIs.

Using the BDO innovation scan, you can gain an adequate picture of the innovative drive in your organisation and of the aspects that need improvement. Please do not hesitate to contact one of our specialists if you wish to attend a workshop on innovation with your team on the basis of the scan.