Experiment with Digital Innovation Externally

Digitalization stipulates companies work together in a hyper-connected and continuously converging environment in which organizations can explore and manage innovation in a structural way.

Innovation is a systematic way of applying creativity in real life and business. In general, innovation is a discipline for markets change and shift, and for each company attempting to deal with these changes, there is a different path to follow. An innovation ecosystem should fully cover wide enough directions. It can involve bringing in ideas from outside, the diverse communities to drive features and understand the value-in-use of products/services, and take a structural approach to experiment digital innovation externally.

Look at what others are doing in your industry: Great ideas can be gleaned by viewing similar businesses in your own industry, state, nation or the other side of the world. Design your ideation processes in a way that it allows you to consider multiple viewpoints in a creative challenge for sourcing a lot of ideas externally. More and more firms are learning and implementing industry best practices in innovation, perhaps it is a better approach to strive for using good practices. There is a recognizable core of approaches and activities that produce profitable innovation, and there are companies that use them. But keep in mind: If the best practice you want to adopt is to be implemented in the same context, it could work. If the context is different, it is worth understanding how that difference could impact the situation. Is that the idea or practice good for a certain organization and for the specific situation and challenges that are faced or that actually requires different priorities as compared to others. Be curious about looking at what others are doing, but be cautious of blindly following, as innovation is a differentiated competency which cannot be imitated so easily. Every organization needs to develop its own set of best and next practices.

Look at other industries locally and around the world who may serve a similar target market: Use these insights to create/ modify your products and lead the way in your industry. Digital innovation must be a multi-disciplinary effort to connect the wider dots. Cross-industrial dot connection would add nonlinear thinking and tangential thinking provide more opportunity for innovation than linear thinking. Digital hyper-connectivity can foster innovation through the broader scope of collaboration. it's important to digitally connect key resources/assets in their vicinity/context to the resource-rich innovation hubs/clusters across the business ecosystem. It can also involve close-coupled relationships between organizations, with the intent of exploring areas of learning that fit strategically for all parties. In doing so, you can create the collegiality and "shared context for learning," for sparking creativity. From an idea management perspective, interact with people from another industry, the individuals that shift gears in their day to day work can often produce more fresh ideas, with their ability to think more holistically when it comes to new products or designs, and more often during the early stages of ideation around disruptive innovations.

Query your non-customers: Why isn’t everyone buying your product? Are there consumers who are not yet in the category but could be if a suitable product was available? The outcome could lead to a whole new market to play in. The main challenge organizations face when attempting to innovate is a consistent process through which they can develop an idea to bring the business value. Communities help develop ideas. Communities based on mutual interest encourage close collaboration. To expand your customer base, it's a matter of co-creating with people outside your current customers, and design community that shares a common interest, using a consistent process while maintaining momentum. These communities can be engaged in offering ideas, enhancing these ideas by combining and building upon one another to shape solutions and work together to implement resulting innovations. The paradigm shifts when these clusters morph into larger entities that have sufficiently large internal resources to develop innovative ideas, expand the customer base, create fresh ideas and offer new products or services to attract prospects and fit their needs.

Review of the past: Some things from the past are circular and keep coming back in. Your business could take advantage of re-introducing the past in a new way. On the roadmap for developing the capability to successfully and perhaps continuously deliver transformational innovations, there are a number of incremental opportunities based on the lesson learned from the past. Incremental innovation is the accumulated step of doing transformational innovation. In fact, you cannot “disrupt” without incremental innovation being part of the process. Review of the past is necessary, however, do not take the innovation theories or best practices as absolute truth. Due to the changing circumstances, some best practices are no longer the best practices for you; or some innovation theories are also outdated somehow. Failure is part of innovation. A balanced approach for innovation management is that failures need to be analyzed, and “lesson learned,” should be applied in the future wisely.

Engage with futurists/visionaries: Futurists can often inform you of what is coming, It can also tell what customers need and perhaps the future trend of products and services. This is largely due to the fact that innovating in today’s digital world has become increasingly complex in nature. The digital leaders need to observe, perceive, and pay attention to the myriad of internal, external, national or global forces that define and influence the way we do business these days. The futurists or visionaries have the growth mind to predict and catch the digital trend. In this fast-changing world, if you don't look further, keep learning, and move forward, you are already lagging. The visionaries think forward and innovatively. But others get stuck to the conventional wisdom for too long; it leads to the outdated perceptions which stifle innovation. Innovation needs to lay out different structures, thinking the solutions to allow this to develop in its potential where organizations are combining all that is available to them in imaginative, advantageous ways. Digital visionaries are the outliers who can step out of a conventional thinking box, or linear patterns. Therefore, they could see things further or deeper.

Digitalization stipulates companies work together in a hyper-connected and continuously converging environment in which organizations can explore and manage innovation in a structural way. Explore innovation internally and experiment innovation externally. How much further along would innovation go if having great management and creative teams facilitated by those proactive innovators, to develop socially and environmentally sustainable innovations. That is the way to pursue the art of possible.

Posted in: Digital Master,Innovation,IT Innovation