What will our future look like? Uncertain. What will be successful in the future? Also uncertain. Today, we always want to be able to predict everything precisely at any time, and we want to be prepared for all contingencies. But uncertainty simply cannot be planned strategically.
But: You can always be one step ahead of it by steering towards it through innovative leadership, thinking ahead and tackling the future with courage. Because one thing is definitely certain: In order to be able to assert oneself in the current and future market, regardless of industry and product, innovative thinking must be taken.
Leadership means having a vision and sharing it with others. Innovative thinking makes it possible to inspire and motivate others.
At Kitchen Stories, we are convinced that leadership in any form is not a question of opportunities or responsibilities — it is a question of attitude, of attitude towards the world, of looking critically at the existing situation over and over again. For us, this is reflected time and again in the question of whether there is a need for optimization from a user's point of view or how we can adapt our B2B products even better to the future needs of brands and companies. Derived from the Latin term innovatio Does innovation mean a renovation create. For this to succeed, leadership must be lived out at all levels:
Innovation leadership as a management style
From a management perspective, according to our Chief Operating Officer Alexander Bauer, it is particularly important to motivate an organization and enable it to be innovative, to encourage it to question the status quo and to constantly strive to become better and better. “It is important that this not only happens top-down, but is also lived out by the operational teams.”
Focusing on customers
“Innovation doesn't always have to be thought big. It is usually just a small but very meaningful change on an existing basis that takes campaign collaboration and performance to a whole new level. The trick is to choose what is most relevant for our customers. ,” says Mengting Gao, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Kitchen Stories.
As an integral part of processes
Innovative forward thinking doesn't have to depend on past experience or known facts. “It's more about thinking through processes backwards, imagining a future situation and finding out how to get there,” says Fabian Lucas, Chief Technology Officer. Anyone who thinks ahead innovatively has the advantage of establishing themselves as thought leaders within their own community. As a result of the acceptance achieved, the target group trusts the views and content of the company. We at Kitchen Stories have also built up a strong, very active international community over the years, which relies on our opinion and places its trust in us every day.
Innovation that — Realization of a novel, advanced solution for a specific problem, particularly the introduction of a new product or the application of a new process.
When Verena Hubertz and Mengting Gao founded the product Kitchen Stories in 2013, virtually gave birth to the “Innovation Leadership” gene by combining the digital world of food with new technology and high-quality content. As one of the first cooking apps to combine emotional videos with qualitative step pictures for the first time, they succeeded in significantly changing users' cooking experience. High-quality design paired with a high level of user-friendliness through intuitive technology gave Kitchen Stories a pioneering position in the market that continues to this day.
And we were rewarded: Several awards from Apple and Google followed, such as the “Google Play Store Best of 2016 Award” or the “Apple Design Award 2017.” In the same year, Tim Cook also wanted to see for himself our vision and mission and visited us in our old Kreuzberg office. For 7 years now, thanks in part to our great partnership with Apple, we have always been at the forefront when it comes to implementing new technologies and platforms.
But that's not enough for us; after all, one of our values is: “Stay curious and hungry.” We are not satisfied with the status quo. Our Director of Business Development & Strategic Partnerships, Harm-Jörg Heikens, particularly appreciates the cross-team mentality: “I've never met anyone at Kitchen Stories who basically wanted to keep doing things like this 'because we've always done it that way... '”
And it should stay that way, because our goal is to become the most relevant platform in the area of cooking. This applies not only to our users, but also to our partnerships and the expansion of further collaborations with brands and companies. And even if we can't look into the future, we can say one thing with certainty: By consistently implementing and implementing innovative (thinking) processes, we are definitely prepared for the future.
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