How Collaboration Can Lead to Successful Innovation

How Collaboration Can Lead to Successful Innovation.

Is it time to take your business to the next level? Sometimes in business, you will reach a plateau.

This occurs naturally and should not cause panic. But, if you want to grow the company further, you need to add something.

Collaboration might be exactly what you need! Successful innovation happens when great minds work together to form superior ideas. Keep reading to learn more!

Benefits of Collaboration In the Workplace

We live in a world that often teaches us the importance of individuality. So, you might stray away from collaboration. But, done correctly, the uniqueness of each individual creates a synergistic effect.

Let’s look at the benefits!

More Ideas

While one mind creates many ideas, many minds generate more. This gives you more options to work with. More options mean greater opportunity for a successful outcome.

Conflict

Many minds will innately create conflict with clashing viewpoints. While this may sound like something you want to avoid, some of the best concepts come through conflict compromise.

With more than one mind, you gain additional knowledge and skillsets. Different strengths that will come into play to overcome other weaknesses.

Unique Insights

You can implement one idea in many ways. Sharing your ideas with others allows you to hear different points of view on how to utilise those thoughts. This will help you find faults one person might have missed, offering more opportunities for improvement.

More Clout

When presenting your innovations to clientele or the public, you will most likely talk about the team who worked on it. Mentioning a team of experts will help sceptics get on board. It shows that the idea was well thought out and this builds trust.

More Efficiency

Collaborating means more hands-on deck. This allows you to delegate tasks to the people best equipped to handle them. Working this way provides maximum efficiency for time and effort.

Increased Connections

As you reach out to connect with one person, you also inherit their connections. For instance, a new team member might know somebody high up in a useful field that you had no prior contact with. You will find strength in numbers when it comes to business networking.

Ways To Collaborate In Business

You can create connections for business in many ways. Some will come from the inside while others you will reach beyond the scope of your company for.

Working Together Internally

Working together on the inside can come in many forms. It might involve everybody or you might only want a few members on board, depending on the project.

You might collaborate with everybody by brainstorming together once a week or twice each month. Or, you might take a quieter approach by leaving an idea box in the office that welcomes thoughts, criticisms, and suggestions.

Within the office, you may also create collaborative teams for different projects. On each team, you will want to balance-out strengths and weaknesses and incorporate the right expertise for the assignment.

Working With Others Externally

Buddying up with outside businesses can seem scary. You might feel worried about sharing secrets and dealing with finances together.

But, outside connections for business offers great opportunities. How you go about it depends on what you need from one another.

It might look as simple as putting each other’s logo up on your tradeshow booth or at special events and linking to one another’s site on your webpage. Or, you may dive deep with them, sharing commercials and launching something big together.

How To Successfully Team Up

As you can see, you may go about collaborating in a number of ways. But, you can follow some basic strategies no matter what.

Formulate a Proposition

Create a plan of how this will work. Write out all of the details on paper.

Present this idea to whomever you wish to take part in the collaboration. Remember that you may need to tweak your vision for it to work since it involves other minds.

Brainstorm

Your proposition outlines a vision. Now you need to throw around ideas with the team on how to execute your plan.

Make sure everybody’s voice is heard. Do not allow one person to dictate while everybody else follows the lead or else you lose the point of collaboration.

Assign Tasks for Team Members

Do not go into a project without knowing who will do what. Doing so will get messy. It could lead to nothing getting done, or members feeling like another teammate stepped on their toes.

Create a task list. This will clearly present everything that you all need to accomplish.

Assess the strengths and weaknesses of each person. Doing this helps put everybody in the proper position where they will work most efficiently.

Make sure you assign a mediator, especially if this collaboration involves more than a few people. This person should make sure that all group communications run smoothly.

They will remind people not to talk over each other and keep cool in the room. When frustrations run high, they may also restate points members are trying to make in a different way to help others gain a clearer understanding. They may also suggest a break if tension runs too high.

Touch Base Regularly

Think of this as a relationship. Communication is key.

Members need to know to communicate progress, new developments, and changes made along the way. This ensures that you all move in the same direction to create a coherent outcome.

Complete It

When the going gets tough, keep moving! Many group tasks fail because people cannot find a compromise. Find your common ground and keep working through it until you come out on top.

Successful Innovation Happens Together

If you want something done, they say to do it yourself. But, if you want to create something spectacular, collaborate.

Successful innovation takes a team, and we want to be a part of it! Sign up for one of our leadership programs that will help you learn how to not only work in a team but to lead one.