Running IT as Innovation Threshold

It’s a natural evolution as most innovation initiatives involve IT.

Digital is the age of innovation. Innovation management is about transforming new ideas to achieve their business value. Innovation is what leads to differentiation. When looking at businesses or organizations, any innovation practice today is always a combination of people, process, and technology. The most powerful innovation navigation system involves tapping the organization's ecosystem for collective perspectives and knitting all critical business elements such as people, process, and technology into differentiated innovation competency in which IT is the threshold.

Information could be one of the most time intensive pieces to innovation puzzles: Information brings about business ideas and insight; business ideas generate lots of information. It is so critical to streamlining information flow across functional boundaries to nurture ideas and keep them flowing. The creative idea is often, if not always arrived through the interaction of ideas from different domains of thoughts, knowledge, and experiences, cross-field without boundaries. IT plays a significant role in adding those critical pieces which are needed for the accelerating validation of facts about business ideas, definition, benefits and shortcomings, applications, and competing technologies. The abundance of information and the range of emerging technologies can help to foster a deeper sense of connection and purpose in employees, ignite latent worker passion and bring together disparate parts of the organization to build a highly innovative business. Digital IT leaders need to develop business insight, not just through IT lenses, but through the outside-in business lens. Then, they can practice that knowledge to start innovating at the organizational level and across the business ecosystem.

IT has a great opportunity to catalyze innovation and lead the business transformation: To transform IT from a controller to a catalyst, the digital mantra for running IT organizations is to "do more with innovation." Innovative IT can only happen if IT is regarded as a strategic business partner and given the role in catalyzing innovation and driving business changes. With unprecedented velocity and complexity, IT leaders have to be really creative on how they adapt to changes and be experimental to try new things and ensure that IT is strategically positioned to be ahead of where the business is moving next and drive innovations proactively. IT leaders need to share their vision of where a company should go and how it will get there, how it might be missing out opportunities without taking actions; they should be able to recognize the struggles of the company, identify the issues associated with innovation in an enterprise and across the business ecosystem. Talented IT professionals are business ‘gurus’ with technical proficiency, they can understand the real world business problems deeply and come up with innovative business solutions proactively.

IT has to take a holistic approach to handle the investigation of innovative business solutions and create business differentiation: Most companies fail at innovation execution because they have no clear processes, nor understand the linkage required to work horizontally across departments or take a holistic approach to manage innovation. IT-driven Innovation Management nowadays is more science than art. What defines science from chance is the ability to repeat a process with the same resultant solution every time. Every organization needs to develop tailored innovation principles, methodologies, or practices by leveraging effective technologies, tools or methodologies and apply them wisely with the expertise to drive innovation and develop the organizational level innovation competency. It takes a systematic and disciplined approach to manage a balanced innovation portfolio. By empowering IT and leveraging digital platforms and technologies, businesses can be more effective in executing innovative ideas, relying less on silo functions, and more on cross-functional collaboration and innovation. Innovation processes need to be rigorous, not too rigid; an organization that has a lightweight process which allows creativity and innovation to flow, get protected, channeled and nurtured will succeed more often than an organization that does not have such a process.

It’s a natural evolution as most innovation initiatives involve IT. Digital organizations must manage information effectively, and bring to the table innovative solutions that meet customers’ needs while reducing the cost to market. IT is as an innovation threshold for integrating key business elements into differentiated competency. IT leaders should look at innovation from the perspective of developing business-wide innovation competencies, scaling up innovation practices, amplifying innovation effect, and building up the innovation framework which enables the business to manage innovation in a structural way.

Posted in: Innovation,IT Innovation