“Innovation: The process of translating an idea or invention into a good or service that creates value or for which customers will pay.”
Innovation Culture
“Innovation culture is the work environment that leaders cultivate in order to nurture unorthodox thinking and its application. Workplaces that foster a culture of innovation generally subscribe to the belief that innovation is not the province of top leadership but can come from anyone in the organization.” A culture of innovation is an environment that supports creative thinking and advances efforts to extract economic and social value from knowledge, and, in doing so, generates new or improved products, services or processes.
A healthy culture of innovation has a shared set of values and mutually reinforcing beliefs about the importance of innovation as well as an integrated pattern of behaviour that supports research and innovation.
The classic definition of innovation is “immense, incomplete and inimitable.” Innovators serve their customers with products, services and processes that radically shape customers’ perceptions and needs, creating new and enduring markets. Conceiving innovations requires breakthrough creativity, imagination and instinct. Developing them requires perceptiveness, ingenuity and agility. Implementing them requires co-operation across the enterprise.
Vida e Caffé’s Innovation Culture:
Vida e Caffé’s offer customers service excellence, ethical behavior and a unique experience when associated with the brand. They ensure that they have hand picked all products with careful attention being given to quality as well as most importantly, affordability. The service delivery of Vida e Caffé is the key to their success. They ensure that they always consider their employees first, empowering them to grow their careers within the company. By doing this they create a culture based on teamwork. By ensuring their employees’ needs and wants are fully satisfied, the desire to give the consumer the best service possible is ensured.
A successful brand needs a strong and innovative leadership as well as a good attitude towards its staff, the Vida e Caffé’s baristas. The company spends a large amount of time in finding and training staff, and sees that this training and development is key to maintaining its position in the market. Staff training takes a lot of time and they look for personalities, always with a big smile. They like their staff to enjoy their work because that shines through in the customer service experience.
Vida e Caffé removes constraints by sharing knowledge and decision making with its staff which fosters expanding horizons. They have created an environment of creativity and intellectual satisfaction in order to identify those who fit in and those who do not. They set up benchmarks for performance, action and continuous improvement. Their aim is to remove obstacles of culture change and create organizational conditions that are conducive to innovation. Innovative behaviour does not stay innovative forever. Strategy must be continuously improved by probing boundaries and pushing them forward to stay ahead.
A Driver of Innovation:
In order for an organisation to become and remain a market leader, there needs to be a continuous flow of innovation. There are several factors that drive organisations to constantly innovate, learn and adapt (O’Sullivan, 2008).
If you were to list the drivers of innovation, the list could be quite long. The driver mostly depends on the context of the situation. According to Mila (2007), there are four dominant drivers of innovation in most (if not all) businesses and organisations. These are emerging technologies, competitor actions, new ideas and the external environment (Mila, 2007).
Economic, Financial and Social Drivers of Innovation:
As we have established that the drivers of innovation mostly differ based on the context of a situation, it also depends on the values and goals of an organisation.
1) Economic Drivers of Innovation
Robles (2009) explains innovation economics as “the study of how societies create new forms of production, products, and business models to expand wealth and quality of life.” The main drivers are:
· Productive Efficiency
· Adaptive Efficiency.
2) Financial Drivers of Innovation
Wall (2014) defines financial innovation as “the act of creating and then popularising new financial instruments as well as new financial technologies, institutions and markets. It includes institutional, product and process innovation”. He further points out the main drivers:
· Technology;
· Regulations;
3) Social Drivers of Innovation
According to the Stanford Graduate School of Business (2015), social innovation is a “novel solution to a social problem that is more effective, efficient, sustainable, or just than current solutions. The value created accrues primarily to society rather than to private individuals”. The main drivers are (as listed by Stanford Graduate School of Business, 2015):
· Exchange of ideas and values;
· Shifts in roles and relationships;
· Integration of private capital with public and philanthropic support
Successful innovation relies on a supportive business environment. A poor business environment can substantially increase the cost of developing new products and make returns to innovation much more uncertain, undermining firms incentives to innovate.
Innovation is vital to every department of the business in order for it to evolve and grow. And while there is no simple switch to turn innovation on and off, there are key drivers that can keep your team’s creative juices flowing and get the cogs turning when needed.
Encouraging a Culture of Innovation: Rather than simply acknowledging innovation as and when it occurs on an ad hoc basis, organisations can drive innovation on a constant basis by creating a culture. This means highlighting what significant cultural changes need to be made in company to help innovation become a more regular and natural occurrence.
Vida e Caffé’s Drivers of Innovation:
Innovation is the key to the success of any business and encouraging it with a business isn’t a complicated process. Vida e Caffé has to stay innovative in order to remain competeivive and have an edge on their competitors and their offerings. Vida e Caffés central innovative driver is their new and improved loyalty programme.
Emerging Technologies
Vida e Caffé has a loyalty program which they provide to their consumers in order to give back when they purchase from the brand. This loyalty program started by providing consumers with a Vida e credit card which you were required to swipe each time a purchase was made. They then proceeded to innovate, develop and build a mobile loyalty and payment application that would change the way customers engaged with coffee culture in a remarkably digital way.
This technology has evolved into a downloadable online application for all smart phones and tablets which most consumers own. This application allows consumers to pay using their debit or credit card linked to the mobile application as well as earn and view instant cash based loyalty points from every purchase. It allows consumers to send and receive monetary vouchers and provides maps and locations of all Vida e café branches.
This application allows Vida e Caffé to offer a great, innovative solution that cuts time at the till point and delivers convenience to their customers. It allows the company to receive real-time data reports to enable a better service offering to their customer base. It distributes coupons and offers to drive sales and to reward behaviour and communicates and engages directly with their customers.
Example of the application:
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