The Monthly Innovation Brief: The Practices and Pitfalls of Innovation Management Feb. 2016

Innovation is essentially about tackling the complexities of business dynamic.

Innovation takes the cycle of observing-questioning-connecting-networking-experimenting. From a management perspective, innovation is how to transform novel ideas to achieve its business value. Due to fierce competition and hyper-complexity of the modern business, innovation is essentially about tackling the complexities of business dynamic. Here are a series of blogs to brainstorm the practices and pitfalls of innovation management.

The Practices and Pitfalls of Innovation Management

Can you Impose a Culture of Innovation? Culture is better defined by the "collective mindsets, attitudes, and behaviors of people in an organization.” There is no question that culture can make or break an organization. Nowadays, innovation becomes an important ingredient in business strategy, but how to cultivate the culture of innovation is perhaps one of the biggest challenges facing business leaders today. Can you impose a culture of innovation, or shall you build, cultivate, or foster it, and how? What are the key elements in fostering a culture of innovation?

Three Practices of Digital Innovation, Generally speaking, innovation is to transform novel ideas to achieve their business values. It is not a serendipity, but a discipline and a set of practices to achieve business goals. Innovation helps to tackle the complexities of business dynamic in the digital ecosystem, but often within itself, it needs to change and improve as well. Therefore, digital paradigm shift also includes the perspective of building a scalable innovation environment and an innovation ecosystem. It is crucial to fine tune innovation processes, capabilities, and develop a set of practices to manage innovation portfolio more effectively.

How to Avoid Pitfalls in Innovation Management Innovation is both art and science. Innovation is a systematic way of applying creativity in the real life and business. In general, business innovation is a management discipline, and innovation management has overall very low success rate. The reasons why failure occurs vary widely, it is no wonder why many leaders are reluctant to act on bold ideas with good business potential due to the high likelihood of failure. So more specifically, what are the pitfalls in innovation management and how to manage innovation more effectively?

Running IT as an Innovation Engine in Digital Organizations: Organizations large or small are at the digital journey, and corporate IT is also shifting from a support center to an innovation engine, because more often information is the lifeblood, and technology is the disruptor to push the business world into the digital paradigm. Hence, for any forward-thinking organizations, IT mantra is shifting from “doing more with less,” to “doing more with innovation." But more specifically, how to run IT as an innovation engine to accelerate digital shift?

Three Aspects of Customer Centric Innovation:  One of the key characteristics of a digital business is customer centricity. The customer is absolutely a vital part of the overall innovation process. Customer-centric innovation can accomplish far more than incremental product/service improvement, it can also implement path breaking products or service, build evolutionary business models as well.

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