Innovativeness

Innovative companies usually have unique capabilities to make them stand out and differentiate them from others to practice innovation and achieve better business results.

We are what we continue thinking and doing. High-professionalism means authenticity. Learning, experiencing, training, are all important to improve professional competencies nowadays. To move up toward the next level of professional competency, being innovative is a state of mind, creativity is one of the most desired professional competencies. 

People need to keep exploring their talent, broadening their relevant skills and deepening their expertise to solve more complex problems and achieve higher than expected results.

Take entrepreneurs’ spirit to turn the status quo upside down: The pace of change is expedited and knowledge is outdated sooner than what you think of. Thus, innovators are in strong demand to break down traditional thinking boxes, challenging common beliefs, and updating old rules. In ever-expanding and hyper-connected digital organizations, understanding the business dynamics, working to shape a good strategy takes attention and energy, turning the status quo upside down for dealing with uncertainty via interdisciplinarity of art and science.

Entrepreneurs think out of the box, professional managers set up and manage within the box; entrepreneurs present resilience; professional managers manage elasticity. In order to adapt to today’s business dynamic and spur innovation, such two sets of leadership characteristics can complement each other seamlessly, and also integrate each other’s viewpoints. Some leaders use a counter argument in open discussions just to ensure multiple points of view are explored, bringing together management teams in a common and committed effort, and moving people in the right direction despite many obstacles on the way to run a highly effective and innovative company.

Feedback and feedforward are important for a business’s success in the long term: Either doing innovation or solving critical business issues, lack of effective feedback management will deepen a variety of gaps and create measurement blind spots. Some traditional performance management causes dysfunctional behaviors and motivates people to hide bad news on delays and cost overruns. The invaluable information such as feedback on business action/impacts/outcomes, feedback on business initiatives realization/implementation, feedback on organizational potential can significantly improve business performance for the long run.

With frequent disruptions and exponential growth of information, high velocity and uncertainty, feedback needs to be relevant and continuous, as close to real-time as possible, in control of the recipient and in a way the recipient can understand. By improving quality and relevance of feedback, innovation managers can communicate their understanding and the contributions they expect of their parts of the organization to their teams and employees. They should truly listen to what their people have to say about solving the issues identified, and not let their own presumptions get in the way.

Innovation is not serendipity, but a management process and differentiated business competency: Environment either encourages or discourages innovation, the ease or difficulties inherent in surviving. In face of fierce competition and unprecedented uncertainty, individuals and organizations need to keep improving their level of competency from building linear capabilities to solve a specific set of problems to reaching the next level of integral and scalable competencies for solving more complex problems. It’s important to manage innovation systematically via a good alignment of great innovators, reliable information, disruptive technologies, and rigorous but not overly rigid processes for building innovation competency.

To truly build digital workforce innovation competency, "development, enhancement, and coaching" are important to meet the individuals’ and the organizational development needs, build cross domain knowledge, and set the process to achieve well-defined goals and reach the next level of the growth cycle and business transcendence. All businesses should have a handful of "bets" in the breakthrough innovation category to lift the business up to the next level of organizational growth. It’s also important to fine-tune many critical business factors, both “hard” and “soft” factors to build innovation capacity of the business.

To develop differentiated business advantages, companies have to keep searching for new opportunities to disrupt, rather than being disrupted. Every organization has their set of capabilities to get work done or solve problems. Innovative companies usually have unique capabilities to make them stand out and differentiate them from others to practice innovation and achieve better business results.

Posted in: Innovation,Leadership Master