AAt 3M, all employees spend 15 percent of their time working on projects of their own design; they are expected to innovate and will be evaluated accordingly. If we want our people to focus on serving the customer we must be more innovative, so as our customer needs change we continue to serve them.

Flexibility and constant questioning are the keys to long-term success. People Express had a vital entrepreneurial culture and loose managerial style that served it’s customers well as a start-up airline. As a billion-dollar company, it needed a new and more structured environment. Failure to make that change led to disasterous customer service and bankruptcy.

Every division of 3M is expected to make 25 percent of its profits from products introduced in the last five years. 3M is one of the most innovative companies in the world because it’s designed to be innovative. It’s organizational environment demands, supports, and rewards new ideas. They are constantly looking forward to meeting changing customer needs.

More important than salaries or bonuses is recognition. People want to be creative, and to be known as being creative. They want to make something meaningful happen and keep customers coming back for more. What often stands in the way of innovation is an entrenched bureaucracy and an “adoration” of the “old ways” of doing things.

How can your organization consistently come up with innovative ideas to serve ever changing customer needs? What new way of delivering a service might enrich a customer segment? Understand trends in the market. Ask your customers, suppliers, distributors, and employees for input!

Customer needs and priorities change. New customer segments emerge or can even be deliberately developed, thereby creating new needs to be met. Most strategic innovators don’t come up with brilliant new products.

Herb Kelleher, CEO Southwest Airlines didn’t invent a new airplane. He simply identified an under-served customer segment. No one had ever tried a short-haul, point-to-point, low-cost, high frequency airline. Innovative strategies demand that you take a fresh look at the “who” and “what” issues of your customer, as well as the “how.”

To see if your idea will be accepted by the market, test it in various potential markets. Corning introduced its optical fibers in four market segments, long-distance phone lines, picture phones, cable TV, and the military, before selecting long-distance as its correct customer target.

To identify what unique product, first identify a list of all the possible products you could offer. Ask what new or latent customer needs you might satisfy. What unique specialty do you have that could answer an unmet or underserved need?

The choice is easier than it seems: If you don’t innovate to serve changing customer needs, someone will do it for you. The individual activities you choose must be the ones demanded by the customer. There’s no point in building a network of dealers if your customers would rather buy your product on-line.

Activities must fit with each other. Manufacturing must be able to make the products that marketing is promoting and must be in balance with each other. Increase your sales and marketing capacity without increasing the production and you’ll end up with a lot of unhappy customers.

Organizations must not fail to revisit their changing customer needs every year. Today’s success is no guarantee that you will be around tomorrow. Tomorrow’s success requires a superior strategy for serving tomorrow’s markets, not in the markets of today. No strategic position remains favorable forever.

If you enjoyed this column you’ll love our Books (click here) and Training Programs (click here). Each is filled with hundreds of leading edge profit enhancing ideas from the best business thinkers in the world. This is one of over 300 columns published and part of the reason why The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have called The DreamSpeaker™ about Business Planning Issues.