Three “F” Factors in Digital Innovation

Innovation has many success factors. Innovation has to result in something which leads us to a better state than where we are today.

Digital transformation represents a break from the past, with a high level of impact and complexity. There is no doubt innovation is becoming more important whereas technology becomes more advanced in the digital era. In fact, the speed of change is expedited, so does the speed of innovation. There are many key factors to lead the success of digital innovations. Here are three “F” factors in digital innovation.

Fluidity: Digital is the age of innovation because creativity is about connecting the dots in the wider scope. How cleverly you connect your dots by leveraging your experiences, sharing interdisciplinary knowledge, and finding a solution to the problems is creativity which is also an important aspect of digital fluency. Digital fluency is interconnected with digital fluidity. Digital means flow, data flow, information flow, knowledge flow, mind flow, and business flow.  Organizations, like individuals, need to be in flow to communicate fluently and operate smoothly.  an organization can approach the flow zone when the positions in its hierarchy have clear, accountable tasks. From an organizational structural design perspective, delayering becomes a lens through which it is possible to examine and then fix many other issues. Digital fluidity enables free thinking and intuition. On the navigation dimension, a connecting mind, or collective minds in a business setting with digital fluency have more antennae focused on the trends and what’s going on in the world, or what it will impact the next generation, and what group will have better cognitive diversity with different opinions, and creativity sparkling.

Flexibility: Flexibility is about thinking alternative ways to do things. At the individual level, a flexible mind is creative to thinking outside of the box, open upon the feedback and ideas. But is risk tolerant? People with a flexible mind can work as a team more seamlessly. At the team level, a flexible work environment encourages collaborative thinking, build adaptability to create mutual interest communities, to encourage brainstorming and enable ideas to flow. It is important to set the principles and build a practical framework for managing innovations from keeping ideas flow to implementing ideas systematically. Flexibility is crucial to managing innovation because overly rigid rules or processes will stifle creativity and decrease innovation effectiveness. etc. From innovation management perspective, the imperative is to build a culture of innovation which has flexibility, agility, and resilience as key characteristics. In practice, it’s easy to say you are flexible or playful and have a lot of innovative desire, but culturally within the walls of an organization, the overly rigid processes still stifle innovation. An innovation leader allows an innovator to bend the rules as long as it is not harmful to the organization. As long as this flexibility is provided with necessary oversight by the management, It is also crucial to building flexible processes focusing on outcomes without micromanagement and creates a sense of urgency as well. You have to remember that innovation can be a breakthrough and notice that it requires a “break.” They include being a risk taker, challenging the status quo, being fearless, looking at failure as a learning opportunity, and always looking for a better way.

Failure: Failure is part of innovation; without failures, without the blossom of innovation. It depends on how you read failure. And it depends on what you learn from it. The point is to avoid the repetitive mistakes and focus on lessons learned from failures. At the age of innovation, failure is seen as a fruit full of experience, failure is very much an intrinsic part of innovating. To improve innovation success rate, it is a balancing act to have enough failure and an environment that encourages learning from failure quickly and cost-effectively, without having failures that are too frequent or too expensive. Learning from failures is a way to improve until you find the wonderful solution which will suit market or simply a waste of time. As you learn more from failure than from your success.

Innovation has many success factors. Innovation has to result in something which leads us to a better state than where we are today. There’s no such one size fit all success formula for innovation management success. It is important to define the most compelling and unique innovation approach or a mix of different approaches. Innovation needs to lay out different structures, thinking, and solutions to allow developing into its potential where organizations are combining all that is available to them in imaginative and advantageous ways.

Posted in: Creativity,Digitalization,Innovation,IT Innovation