Serendipity can be planned into innovation management. Innovation management can be structured by aligning talented people, robust processes and powerful technology platforms and tools.
Innovation is a managed process, or more precisely, a dynamic system of transforming novel ideas to achieve its business value. It’s a journey and is therefore not possible to pre-describe how it will work out. It involves luck, trial, experimentation, research, and practice by using structured methods, tools, reviews, systematic analysis, or debugging. Managing innovation in a structural way is all about leveraging systems thinking and taking a scientific approach to problem identifying and solving, embracing uncertainty, identifying interconnections and interdependencies, encouraging learning and understanding flows, in order to decode innovation serendipity and improve its success rate.
Assessing the innovation capability of any organization requires a systematic approach: Innovation is one of the differentiated business competencies which are underpinned by varying business elements such as people, process, and technology. A systematic innovation management process helps business recognize challenges, understand boundaries, and deal with constraints. Innovation process effectiveness can be assessed by asking a set of structural questions such as: How will it break through the bottlenecks and increasing innovation speed? How could it identify and manage risks in innovation management? How to leverage “the diversity of thoughts” for creating meaningfully fresh ideas? How to manage the emotion cycle behind innovation such as reducing fear in the organization? Etc. Innovation can be viewed as consisting of many different stages. Some processes are more structured than others in innovation management. From instance, creativity is generally accepted to be less structured than development. Innovation prototyping and implementation are far more “process driven” than idea generation plot. Innovation also often has a lot to do with external circumstances while people tend to focus on internal circumstances. Still, it doesn’t mean that the innovation systems and processes are unstructured. The systematic structure provides the shell within which individuals can collaborate to create transparency to manage innovation. Assessing innovation capability maturity is important because it helps the organization identify innovation bottlenecks and avoid pitfalls in order to improve the innovation management success rate.
The robust processes and tools enable the organization to generate winning concepts on a consistent basis and manage innovation in a structural way: There are many areas within a company where the innovation process can be applied to create value. The systematic innovation is based on gaining an in-depth understanding of business issues and taking a structural way to manage innovation. The ability to innovate is ultimately dictated by the depth of understanding of the business problems or issues to be resolved as well as how to solve them creatively. The companies who get the most from innovation effort have the right ambition, good leadership, effective process, and open culture. A systematic approach is to depict innovation as a system (rather than a traditional process) whose performance depends on the alignment of its various components such as people, process, technology, actions, controls, or resources, etc. Systematic innovation is a structured process and set of practical tools used to design, build or improve products/services/processes that deliver new value to customers or satisfy employees consistently. Innovation process could be very loose on purpose; what’s very rigorous and systematic is the analysis of business issues, opportunities, or marketing dilemmas, etc. The key elements in systematic innovation include people, strategy, process, tool, and culture, missing any one of them will severely impact the sustainability of intentional innovation management effort.
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