Tuesday, January 19, 2021

Innovation Initiation & Risk Intelligence

The good or bad innovation would depend on the business’s attitude to drive innovation and its aptitude to manage innovation. 

The digital era upon us is about innovation. The purpose of Innovation Management is to prepare everything to maximize the transformation of an idea to achieve its business value through well-prepared processes and structures. In reality, business transformation makes a lot of people nervous because it means they have to move out of their comfort zone, which causes innovation inertia. 

To dig deeper, silo, outdated concepts, “we always do things like that” mentality, knowledge limitations, erc, are all the causes of innovation inertia. So how to initiate innovation efforts and how to overcome challenges?


Initiate innovation efforts with well-aligned structure and process: Even though the emerging digital technologies blur functional, industrial, or geographical territories, many traditional organizations are still managed through overly restricted hierarchical management discipline which encourages silo and “rewards” compliance, but discourages “thinking differently.” Conventional wisdom or silo mentality causes innovation inertia. Silos will always exist. Isolation of teams limits creativity, duplication of efforts results in wasting valuable resources. So these companies suffer from innovation inertia and business stagnation. It is important to note that within the organizations, nowadays innovation is rarely an individual action; rather it is a team effort, often across multiple organizational silos, you need to manage innovation in a structural way via a good alignment of innovators, the disruptive technologies, and rigorous, but not rigid processes.

To manage innovation structurally, it’s important to broaden the audience, or expand the collective insight to overcome challenges, digitally connect key resources and assets in their vicinity and context because good ideas are multi-dimensional, they take roots in unsuspected places and they evolve with time and by unexpected connections. By doing that, you can break down silos and build resource-rich innovation hubs and clusters across the business ecosystem. Initiate innovation efforts with well-aligned structure and process. And if you keep perfecting them while communicating the results to the rest of your organization via clarified language, sooner or later, structure and process will become the culture to catalyze innovation.

Being risk intelligent takes courage, but it is a necessary step to manage innovation and make true progress: Innovation comes with the foresight to envision a need that others overlook or ignore and a willingness to forge ahead to satisfy visions, in spite of a risk of failure. People tend to be "risk averse." Practicing innovative thinking takes a certain mental, psychological and conditional chemistry to break away from thoughts that others have thought about or conventional wisdom. Innovation, especially breakthrough innovation is inherently risky because it is new and different. In practice, people tend to be "risk-averse," fear of disruption, the existence of chaos, fear is one of the causes of innovation inertia.

The psychology behind innovation is resilience - being willing to face risks, and overcoming the fear and inertia associated with such risks. Innovation is the most needed change. At the heart of innovation, much of what needs to happen is just change management. With every "change," the risk is involved. The positive attitude to drive innovation efforts is to take the calculated risk and be cautious about obstacles or pitfalls of change, inspire a good innovation initiative, and avoid a bad innovation pitfall.

Levels and ways of inertia manifestation could be a criterion for measuring organizational health and innovation maturity: Corporate culture is the collective mind, attitude, and behavior. The culture of innovation inertia is the collective resistance mindsets. Behavior is a manifestation of attitude, attitude results from the thoughts and mind. More often culture inertia is the very reason to stifle the business innovation. The spirit of business comes from the top, leaders need to constantly ask themselves if their minds are open and professional, and if their attitudes and actions display these values.

The good or bad innovation would depend on the business’s attitude to drive innovation and its aptitude to manage innovation. Employee engagement and mass collaboration in the innovation process increases participation. In reality, there’re always some constraints for businesses to explore the new opportunities or deploy the new ideas. A resistance mind can be cracked and the success rate of innovation can be improved if you apply the right mind, systematic methodology and take the effective approach. Innovative leaders need to find creative ways to tackle innovation potential lying in an enterprise and to provide the necessary tools to drive innovation and define the right set of measures to evaluate innovation initiatives.

The digital organization encourages “self-generated” engagement, innovation, self adaptation, and self-renewal. To overcome inertia, spark creativity and initiate innovation, the digital business life cycle could be viewed as resulting in emergent means of shaping a vision reflecting the objectives and soul of the company, and harnessing outside in people-centricity.






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