Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Three Aspects of Digital Innovation

Now we are all C-generation (the “connected” generation) into the new hyper-connected digital society, to build the digital culture of sharing collective wisdom.

Today we see a rapid shift in the digital paradigm. We are more creative and innovative than ever. We create more value than ever. Some say caring =prosperity. Is it true? When we care, we put in the effort, we change things, hopefully, make them better. By doing this on the small scale, can we help make our own prosperity? Be scaling up, can we overcome many big challenges facing human society as a whole. Is innovation used enough along with caring, to provide an economic solution? Is love the driver? The question is how do we capture value in this new dynamic environment in which information travels in an instant from one side of the plant to the other? What needs to be changed in regards to leadership, methodologies, and practices?


Collaboration on large scale: The latest digital technology such as social computing makes collaboration and sharing possible at a large scale. Those who acquire the culture of sharing and collaborating will simply outperform those who don't. The certain experiences or skills are good in times of static industry age, but they are not so valuable in times of drastic change. The new digital technology is disruptive, it re-configures basic relations of production, it disrupts the balance of power. So the skills that made you successful in the past may not necessarily make you succeed in the new world if you do not continue to learn and build the next level of capability. The young generation, the natives of the Internet already find the digital economy nature; and the “digital immigrants” in between, know the world without Internet, but also, catch up with learning the new technology and its implications, now we are all C-generation (the “connected” generation) into the new hyper-connected digital society, to build the digital culture of sharing collective wisdom.


Digital transformational leadership: The impact of transformational leadership both on followers' creativity at the individual level and on innovation at the organizational level is significant. Some related studies reveal that there is a positive relationship between transformational leadership and employees' creativity. In addition, transformational leadership influences employees' creativity through psychological empowerment. At the organizational level, transformational leadership positively associates with organizational innovation, which is measured with a market-oriented criterion. It seems that many companies going through a period of introspection believe that they already and implicitly understand the nature of innovation... All too often this results in accounting decisions based on reducing the existing costings of the organization. In many organizations, the short term, and immediate pressures are making them look inward to optimize what they know. Hence, the concern is they will not be investing enough to craft a workable future, or searching for new alternatives. With little investment to seek better, these businesses will not have the option of advances, which may lead to better outcomes.


The system and process innovation: The “hard” issues to stifle innovation is that the systems many organizations are using to capture value are becoming inefficient in this changing world. It is also important that many companies approaching the subject, have the objectivity and humility to realize that their system or processes are out of date, and they may not possess the knowledge and skills to run the entirely “in-house.” The challenge is how to leverage the emergent digital technologies to renovate and build up the strong partner relationship to speed up innovation management life cycle. The other digital reality is that soon open source communities will create more technology than all the companies that have ever existed combined. The open innovation paradigm is not just about opening your technology, becoming transparent. It's a new paradigm. There are a lot of things (both “hard” factors such as policy, process, performance, and “soft” factors such as culture, leadership, communication) that come with that, in order to make the digital model transformation sustainable.


We are overloaded with information, knowledge is only a click away nowadays, but we starve for insight, wisdom is still the rare pearl, and innovation is the light hard to reach for most of the organizations. The point is that digital innovation is neither an oxymoron nor a serendipity, you have to manage it strategically and systematically to achieve the consistent longtime business result.

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