Innovation Architecture and Competency

 It requires an Innovation Architecture and some degree of a “hard-wired” innovation system with interdisciplinary knowledge to build innovation competency.

Innovation is a managed process of transforming novel ideas to achieve its business value and it is the development of a new combination of available resources in a way that solves real-world problems in a suitable way. This is especially true if you are looking at new sources of value that haven't been tapped before. Managing innovation to fit the market often requires strategies, architecture designs and product introductions that build towards the long-term perspective. You have to manage it in the right way with the right elements strategically and systematically to achieve consistent business results.

Innovation rules: Innovation follows fundamental principles or basic rules, which are adapted depending on the company's situation and ambition. Setting rules to keep the focus on managing innovation effectively is important to ensure that innovation efforts are steered in the right direction and reaping profit. The right set of rules is not for limiting your imagination, but for framing a structural management system to identify opportunities and mitigate risks. On the other side, innovation is about figuring out better ways to do things, often it has to break some outdated rule, but needs a level of guidance. Rule-breaking or rule-making demands insight, understanding, courage, persistence, among other things.

Innovation strategy: Highly innovative organizations usually have a good innovation strategy to frame effective constraints and facilitate digital communications to diagnose problems and generate fresh ideas by tapping the business ecosystem. A good innovation strategy allows you a number of things such as identifying interconnections and interdependencies, understanding flows or the lack of them, spotting business opportunities or risks, prioritizing and making choices, and formulating creative or unconventional solutions to solve problems. A well-defined innovation strategy helps to clarify: What should the innovation effort focus on - defending the core, penetrating the adjacencies, or entering the white space and how the resources will be balanced across these domains? How can the company make it - through internal development or organic growth?

Innovation process: The “hard” issues to stifle innovation is that the systems, processes or technology many organizations are using to capture innovation value are becoming inefficient in this rapidly changing world. An organization that has a lightweight innovation process which allows ideas to flow, get protected, channeled and nurtured; shields innovation teams from the organization’s dominant logic and established standard or operating procedures, supports both widespread incremental innovation as well as the rarer “step-change” innovation in products/services, will succeed more often than an organization that does not have such a process.

Innovation capability: Innovation happens at the intersection of market insight and technological know-how. Digital innovation has a broader spectrum with hybrid nature including incremental innovation, evolutionary innovation, and radical innovation. Often, organizations can no longer rely on a single individual or team to drive innovation. Build a focused but balanced innovation portfolio that maximizes the output from the innovation team, in terms of adding value to the organization by delivering solutions to the aforementioned attribute and building differentiated innovation capabilities. It is a strategic imperative to develop the organizational level innovation competency.

Innovation governance: Innovation cannot be separated from a specific business purpose and in a broad context, governance is critical for meaningful innovation to deliver business value. However, the problem with governance is that the people enforce governance normally have a frame of reference based on their own experiences, sometimes traditional governance restricts and even actively discourages innovation. Or sometimes governance "standards" can be taken too far and become their own bureaucracy. Innovation needs a level of guidance and the right kind of governance to thrive. Look at innovation and governance as a continuum. Governance isn’t just about putting restrictions on what you can do, it is also about monitoring and knowing when things are not going to plan so that you can take appropriate action at the right time to improve the innovation success rate.

Innovation is the essence of evolution. It takes vision, empathy, and understanding to drive innovation effort. It’s critical to look deeply into the future which can have a profound effect on where you go, and how you get there. Looking uphill can help to identify the real problems that matter, and on a scale that can make a difference. It requires an Innovation Architecture that involves strategy view, process view, capability view, governance view, etc, and some degree of a “hard-wired” innovation system with interdisciplinary knowledge such as technology, economy, psychology, sociology, law, etc, to build innovation competency and achieve sustainable innovation results.

Posted in: EA,Innovation