Organizations of all kinds love to refer to themselves as innovative. You could say that the word ‘innovation’ itself is a popular business buzzword. Every company wants to demonstrate an innovative attitude. Every organization wants to claim a commitment to innovation. But innovation is more than just a buzzword. It is an actual practice, and it is critical to your organization’s success.
How is your organization doing in the innovation department? Before you answer, be aware of that innovation and creation are not the same thing. Just because an organization brings new products to market does it mean that organization is demonstrating innovation.
Here at CSI Health, we are constantly working on creating new products. But that is not what makes us innovative. We are innovative because we think about things differently. We approach medical kiosks and remote healthcare technology from a different mindset. It is a new mindset willing to embrace the direction healthcare is ultimately heading in. Therein lies the difference.
Innovation Is All About Ideas
Forbes contributor Theodore Henderson got it right with a piece published some five years ago. He drew a distinction between creativity and innovation by describing the differences between products and ideas. Innovation is all about the latter.
We design and manufacture telemedicine kiosks, medical kiosks with specialized functionality, and even diagnostic screening solutions – all based on the remote healthcare concept. But what if we were building the exact same products 20 years from now? What if our products never changed? We would hardly seem innovative to our customers or competitors.
Creativity and creation bring about the production of tangible products and usable services. Innovation goes above and beyond. Innovation is all about ideas. It is about finding ways to implement new ideas on behalf of one’s customers. That’s why it is so critical to your organization’s success.
Consumers Expect It
Innovation is something that consumers expect. And it’s not a new phenomenon. Consumers have always expected that the companies they do business would routinely find new and better ways to do things. But on an even deeper level, innovation is part of the human psyche. Most of us spend time thinking about new ways to do things to make our lives better.
If your organization is not actively innovating, you are actually chasing away customers. Unless there is a specific and marketable reason for never changing your company’s products or services, failing to change means dooming your organization to a limited existence.
It Spurs Competition
Innovation is also critical to your organization because it encourages healthy competition. Every time your organization introduces a new innovation, your competitors are compelled to come up with something of their own. That’s how products and services get better. That is how markets mature.
In our industry, most of the current competition exists in the realm of taking advantage of lessons learned at the height of the COVID pandemic. We learned just how beneficial telemedicine can be while hospitals and doctor’s offices were shut down. Now that the U.S. has all but reopened, we aren’t content to go back to business as usual. We want to help push telemedicine to the next level.
We understand how critical innovation is to our success. If we don’t innovate, we will be left behind. Your organization is no different. A lack of innovation ultimately encourages stagnation. And as we all know, stagnation kills everything from private enterprise to nonprofit advocacy.
Does your organization innovate? If not, it’s never too late to get things going. Why not start by considering our state-of-the-art telemedicine and diagnostic solutions? They could change your practice entirely.
