Innovation

 An enriched innovation ecosystem enables systematic innovation management.

Innovation is the most wanted change and the key differentiator between the business leader and the follower. Innovation is not some random effort; in essence, innovation management is about how to manage people, processes, technology, assets, resources, time, and risks to develop innovation as the business-wide unique competency for achieving high-performance business goals, making innovation benefit the widest possible audience, and unleashing full organizational potential.

Innovation capability: Organizations need to have a balanced portfolio of initiatives with the right mix of incremental, substantial, breakthrough innovation. Incremental innovation generally brings short-term value; breakthrough innovation transcends the company up to the next level of business or industrial growth. Innovation usually has a low success rate, because innovation success depends on many factors such as talent, process, resource, etc, part of innovation is not knowing how and for what you will use the budget, some innovation needs to be fed with more resources while others get better by starving them. Thus, different types of innovation should be managed via tailored management processes, scientific resource allocation, and a variety of innovation personas.

Innovation comes in many flavors and there are many opportunities in an enterprise to do so. A well-built portfolio platform enables the business to integrate a well-rounded innovation portfolio, align good policies, structure, and program that innovation managers can use to drive innovation. Remove any of the three, you're liable to fail. A platform approach helps to manage innovation as a structural way, considering the impact that the innovation could make and the speed of innovation deliveries for developing innovation capability systematically.

Innovation capacity: Capability is the ability to do something. Capacity is the throughput of something. The capacity can reflect the gap in capability, either be a throughput gap or resource/ process gap for the innovation capability to deliver innovative products/services. Innovation capacity planning allows the management to gain a transparent view across the organization that should help to level the playing field and improve innovation process efficiency.

Capability stands you out; Capacity scales you up! To make capacity planning more effective, the management should do the information-based forecast, to ensure that application development does not proceed without a "clear business rationale." To scale up innovation and overcome innovation complexity, it’s important for business leaders to improve capacity management effectiveness by keeping innovation processes transparent, enforcing accountability at all levels, and focusing on long term innovation strategy management.

Innovation performance: Innovation success is not always proportional to the capital you invest in or the resource you consume. An objective assessment of innovation performance is crucial for the company to improve innovation competency. Either at the individual or business level, innovation performance is mostly a mix of past and present. Normally, organizations evaluate quantitative or qualitative business results generated by innovation efforts - are you intending to evaluate the organizational capacity/potential to innovate, or the level of past innovation performance measures? Are you benchmarking innovation performance at the industrial scope?

Selecting the right key performance indicators and measuring them in the right way is both art and science. Unfortunately, most innovation indicators are flawed and present limitations. Also, the innovation indicators vary depending on who is doing the measuring, and how they are measuring. Innovation performance is contextual, score innovators, score the company’s innovation capacity, performance, potential, and the level of innovation management maturity

Innovation is the means to the end, it should either benefit your customers or your employees. An enriched innovation ecosystem enables systematic innovation management. Organizations should develop tailored innovation principles, methodologies, practices and apply them wisely with the expertise to really add value and accelerate innovation performance and develop the organizational level innovation competency.

Posted in: Innovation