How to use innovations for company growth

The purpose of this paper is to identify the key characteristics of successful innovation, analyse the innovation process in Unilever and provide set of recommendations for the company. This paper addresses a key question of current business -- how to achieve growth of a company via innovation. The thesis is based on the already published research for identifying the best practices in dealing with innovation, survey with strategic innovation leaders in HHC Unilever, interviews with employees of Unilever, published articles and researches on Unilever and internal documents of the company. Findings indicate that the key characteristics of successful innovators are the corporate culture, innovation strategy, human resources management, structures, evaluation of ideas, processes and metrics. Several improvements were suggested for HHC Unilever. The value of this paper is in the development of an action framework for the delivery of accelerated growth of the company when using innovation. The analysis conducted on Unilever may be replicated to other companies in order to analyse status of their innovative activities.