Overnight innovation has become the core factor of company management. It was like the great discovery.
How to deal with these already real threats from emerging countries? Well, innovating. How to ensure competitiveness in the future? Well, innovating. How to build lasting relationships with clients? Well, innovating. In other words, innovation is the magic word, so it is logical that the top managers have already given the order: "Innóvese".
It reminds me of this to loyalty. When Amex made public that getting a new customer cost five times more than keeping the one you already had, those same top managers also said: "Be loyal" (as of today, the repeatability index, which is much higher than the loyalty, does not exceed 70%).
This tendency to simplify and formulate causes us to fall into a methodology and a systematization with feet of clay. Innovating is associated with inventions and technological devices and having an approved R & D & I process, which makes us believe that it is basically about technology and money. And it is not like that. Innovation, like loyalty, is something very complex and, therefore, very complicated to manage. Innovation, like loyalty, is to create value and create value, both from the reactive perspective, as well as from the proactive one, it is to give a novel response to a need, to any need, of which we are aware, which we it opens up an immense range of perspectives.
Thus, radical innovation, coming from R&D, and incremental innovation, product of the practice of work and the exchange of professional experiences, must give way to the innovation that I have baptized with the name of tuner, a natural result of a solid relationship between supplier and client, which makes it possible to cover all this range.
It is a relationship based on the principle "I win, you win", so that problems, initiatives, proposals, ideas… on both sides are continually present. The two parties have a mutual and reciprocal desire for improvement, which leads to innovation in both directions. On the one hand, the customer pushes the supplier to innovation and, on the other, the supplier helps the customer to innovation.
Now, it is obvious that this is only possible if the relationship between supplier and customer, as said, is close. Getting to know any need, even the most intimate of people, which is where the path to value lies, requires full trust and, today, talking about trust is talking about emotional connection, which leads us to it can only be given by people.
And when I say people, I am not referring to 'geeks' in white coats in a laboratory. I am referring to professionals capable of creating stable, lasting and beneficial relationships with clients, which is the great pending issue, since talking about emotions, especially among technicians, is something that still sounds like heavenly songs.
Therefore, giving the order to “Innóvese” without having emotionally developed professionals is, normally, betting on very expensive and very frustrating illusions. It is very good to say that innovation is the best recipe to compete with the cheap labor of Asian or Eastern countries, but if there is no deep conviction that this type of professionals must first be trained, it will not cease to be a phrase more to swell the book of good intentions.
If you do not have professionals who know their own emotions and know how to coexist satisfactorily with them, you may have 'politically correct' professionals, but you will not have professionals capable of putting yourself in the "other's shoes" and without this type of professionals, you will not It will be able to provide value and if value is not provided, it is very complicated, if not impossible, for most of the companies that make up our business fabric, for there to be innovation.
It is all very well to emphasize innovation, but as long as we have emotionally intelligent professionals. If not, we will be willing, but not being able, which supposes an opportunity cost, perhaps, unaffordable.
