Innovation Strategy as an Effective Constraint

The innovation strategy frames effective constraints which are not only a facilitator but a requirement to value-driven innovation.


Going digital is about breaking down the past and leading toward the future with a quantum leap. With rapid changes, the overwhelming growth of information, emerging technologies and dynamic markets, staying competitive means running a highly innovative business. Organizations are constantly morphing under pressure from the waves of creative destruction that keep business in innovation mode. Highly innovative organization leverages innovation strategy as an effective constraint to stay focused on building the innovation capacity of the business and unlocks a new market or revenue stream.

The innovation strategy frames effective constraints which are not only a facilitator but a requirement to value-driven innovation: The exponential growth of information and increasing speed of changes means the rapid innovation cycles which help organizations select or discard concepts; and when selected, convert novel ideas into innovative solutions quickly. Highly innovative organizations usually have a good innovation strategy to frame effective constraints and facilitate digital dialogues to diagnose problems and generate fresh ideas by tapping the business ecosystem. They also have a powerful innovation navigation system to detect opportunities for innovating and a highly effective IT system to integrate important business elements into innovation competencies. Innovation has risks by nature, therefore, the reality of “keeping the lights on” doesn’t allow companies to spend all their resources on radical innovation due to the high risk and high failure rate. A comprehensive innovation strategy is a requirement to value-driven innovation by creating a clear line of sight between the enterprise vision and how to build a balanced portfolio with mixed breakthrough innovation and incremental innovation.

Having constraints provides guidelines for creativity by providing anchors to explore from: The innovation-driven organization should have an innovation strategy (innovation business model) that opens up opportunities to address the very possibility, holds all innovation initiatives and deploy a range of different management methodologies and technologies and tailor their own circumstances for developing the fitting innovation models. The main challenge organizations face when attempting to innovate is a consistent process through which they can develop an idea, share and manage ideas throughout the enterprise across silos and geographies. Having constraints provides guidelines to build a creative environment to nurture and incubate great ideas, access the maximum number of potentially good ideas for developing innovative products, services, business models and solutions. A good innovation strategy sets the guidelines for streamlining idea flow, provides anchors to explore possibilities, takes incentives to encourage idea-sharing, develops sourcing practices, mitigates risks, and builds the scalable innovation management approaches.

Innovation strategy frees you up from having to do a lot of base research on topics that don't add a lot of business value but are necessary to move forward: Innovation management is about transform novel ideas to achieve it commercial value. Nowadays, the business change is the new normal and innovation in its basic nature is a high-risk area. More often, you are doing something that hasn’t been done before. To achieve high business value, build a good innovation strategy to focus on meeting the needs of important customers, instead of just doing simply interesting research topics. That means customers must be willing to pay for this, be it a product, process or service innovation. A good innovation strategy as leverage point helps the business structure innovation to stay focus and assure that the results of innovative approach will have a positive impact for the clients, partners, end users, and the marketplace. Innovation best practices should get their claim from being the method that takes the least amount of time and resources to deliver a product or service while still meeting acceptable quality standards. A good innovation strategy enables the business focusing on the business goals, develops the innovation best practices and builds business innovation competencies by shaping the best point of view to see innovation as a system and be capable of delivering organization-wide capabilities.

Innovation is about moving forward. In any business, if you are not moving forward, you are moving backwards. The business needs innovation silver lining, makes a good innovation strategy as an effective constraint, nurtures a creative problem-solving system environment, takes a structural approach to manage innovation and expands its influence with the ability to co-create and amplify innovation effect in a dynamic digital ecosystem.

Posted in: Innovation,Project Management