Innovativeinitiatives

Not every innovative company uses every best practice; not every authority agrees on every best practice. The best practices are not universal, especially for innovation.

With the increasing pace of organizational changes and digital disruptions, innovation is the unique path to build business advantage. The available digital technology just makes innovation easier to do now than in the past, less costly and more easily accessible. 

Every organization needs to develop the best or next innovation practices, apply effective technologies, tools or methodologies to drive innovation for really adding value to corporate growth in the long term.

Create a disciplined, managed space for developing and testing new models, products, and business approaches: The “VUCA” new normal acknowledges that we can never know about complex business issues completely; things keep changing and knowledge continues to update. To avoid obsolescence, the business model needs to allow space for innovation. The evolution of innovation only exists in the more open environments that create insights, take advantage of all sources of creativity in a more open way. Thus, it’s no surprise that there is tension between old and new business models. You need a methodological mainframe that allows you to do that, developing and testing new models, products, and business approaches, and leaping innovation management to the next level of maturity.

Innovation happens in which the business interacts with customers. Engaging customers in conversations and focusing on customers' needs should be an easier path to grow the innovation fruit. This involves gaining a deep understanding of the motivational construct of the customer, using a more inductive approach as to what the customer wants to accomplish "next. Technically, the emerging digital trends bring significant opportunities for businesses to pursue growth by leveraging the lightweight digital technologies, allowing creative ideas to flow, get protected, channeled and nurtured, will succeed more often than an organization that does not have such a process.

Lay out different thinking, structures, and solutions to develop innovation potential: Innovation is about breaking down conventional ways to do things. Although innovation is a process which can be managed, there is no standardized formula you can follow to lead innovative changes. Setting policies, tuning structure, and making programs are three levers to drive innovation. A structural innovation system helps those organizations recognize challenges, understand boundaries, and deal with constraints. Innovation effort can be scaled up, to solve bigger and tougher problems, and the innovation effect can be amplified to touch more people, businesses, industries, and societies. The more integrated and culturally based innovation is, the more sustainable and productive such initiatives are.

Methodologically, instead of being rigidly grouped around a specific function or business, agile innovation processes and efficient tools enable the idea flow of generation, contribution, evaluation, selection, and execution stays totally connected. There are robust processes and tools that enable a company to generate winning concepts for innovation management by taking an iterative approach to collectively seek to create differentiated ideas and capture value they could not reach alone on a consistent basis. When the ideas have been developed or when they are able to be applied to meet a short-term objective then they should be pushed through an efficient execution process, so innovation becomes more science than art.

Shield innovation teams from the organization’s dominant logic which might stifle creative thinking and approaches: In many well-established companies, the management discipline is more compliance driven, people do their routine work to meet the management’s preset performance results often quantitatively. It stifles creativity and causes silo mentality. It’s important to build heterogeneous teams that can generate fresh ideas, discover creative logic for coming up with better solutions to complex business problems. In fact, innovations simply benefit from being developed in and subsequently commercialized in a more open ecosystem, it makes the pie of creative ideas grow bigger.

Organizations need to be getting used to these forms of working and commercializing value in the digital era with the new characteristics of hyper-connectivity and convergence, creating a dynamic, expansive, and interdependent methodological environment with a set of multifaceted practices to catalyze innovation. There are varying personas required in innovation management. Organizations may separate a disruptive idea-generation from implementing and sustaining innovation. Innovation explorers develop disruptive solutions, then, when ideas are fully developed and a prototype built, innovation builders or operations gurus take over and work on serial production and sustaining innovation to make products or services more reliable, easier to make, and cost-effective.

Not every innovative company uses every best practice; not every authority agrees on every best practice. The best practices are not universal, especially for innovation. It is a better approach to strive to apply good practice for a certain organization and for the specific situation and challenges that are faced and that actually requires different priorities as compared to others. The goal is to manage a balanced innovation portfolio including both radical innovation and incremental innovation by setting clear strategies, clarifying processes and supporting wide-ranging exploration at each stage to achieve measurable results.

Posted in: Innovation,IT Innovation