I have been lucky to spend the last four days in Brisbane at a MLA Professional Development Program. A key focus of this program has been
'Innovation in the Red Meat Industry' and how to implement change. Innovation is becoming increasingly important to our industry as efficiency improvements and cost reductions are alone no longer enough. Although agriculture has been adopting innovative ideas since the very beginning the focus is now on increasing the rate of innovation and also the rate of adoption.
So what is innovation? It has been made clear throughout the week that innovation is not just random flashes of brilliance. Innovative companies actually have a structured innovation process in place that allows them to be continually improving their business. An advantage that agriculture has in this process is that alot of farmers are not only the manager but they are also the worker. This eliminates the problem of communication breakdown across management levels and should really speed up the innovation process at the farm level. According to Peter Williams (CEO Deloitte Digital) the best way to start the innovation process is to ask yourself 'What is the dumbest thing we do?", by doing this you will get rid of out-dated and irrelevant processes in your business.
In general the innovation process is an interesting topic and I have found it extremely interesting to hear about how a range of companies are taking on an innovative approach.
Over the next couple of weeks we are going to try and blog about some of the recent 'innovations' we have adopted at "Ridge Station", so keep following!
Shell
