Friday, September 11, 2020

Innovation Paradox and Manageability

The dynamic innovation perspective and creative balances allow the organization to morph into living conditions and organizational capacities change to allow a better fit for the purpose.

Digital innovation has an expanded scope and it is benefiting the widest audience of the digital ecosystem. It is one of the differentiated business competencies which are underpinned by varying business elements such as people, process, and technology. 

To demystify innovation, businesses today have to make the strategic choices all the time of where and when and how they innovate. Often creativity is sparked by conflicts. There are paradoxes and tensions in innovation management. Organizations just have to strike the right balance, and improve the success rate of innovation management.






Standardization done right would in fact, aid successful innovation: With fierce competitions and rapid changes, innovation is a differentiated business competency. Businesses today should always be open to, conscious of, and feel empowered to act upon out of the box thinking and pursue the better way to do things. It is very much a "consciousness" thing for digital leaders and professionals to adapt to the digital new normal. On the other side, innovation is a management process, businesses today should build a set of principles and standards to improve its effectiveness and efficiency. Technically speaking, standards are a form of embodied technical knowledge that enables highly effective products/process development. Standardization done right would in fact aid successful innovation.

A well-defined set of rules and frameworks are important for innovation enablement and management. Consider the continuum between innovation and standardization. Standardization is inside-the-box, and innovation is outside-the-box. Organizations need both, and in fact, cannot realistically exist without a healthy balance of both. There are paradoxes in managing innovation, the key is how to strike the right balance of breaking down outdated rules and setting digital principles; encouraging creativity but standardizing and improving innovation manageability.

Manage the tension between defined innovation and processes: Creativity is about generating novel ideas flows, process is about managing flows from chaos. There is tension between creativity and process. Without process, there is chaos and from the chaos, it’s hard to be creative, but too rigid process stifles creativity. A defined process or structure is essential to manage innovation effectively. However, the systems/processes/ technology many organizations are using to capture innovation value are becoming inefficient. Also, there’s no single structure that will work in every organization. Innovation processes could be very loose on purpose; what’s very rigorous and systematic is the analysis of business issues, opportunities, or marketing dilemmas, etc. And a hybrid structure and system provides the shell within which individuals can collaborate to create ideas and manage innovation with transparency.

Most companies fail at innovation execution because they have no clear processes, nor understand the linkage required to work horizontally and take a holistic but flexible approach to managing innovation. The right level of guidance and process is important, but overly rigid processes or too ‘pushy’ goals will stifle innovation. Because each organization or team is different, so innovation processes cannot be fully preplanned. A dynamic and effective innovation management process should help businesses recognize challenges, understand boundaries, and deal with constraints smoothly. It also involves turning organizational structures, processes and the ecosystem to match current stack rank of areas in which innovation will reap the most significant benefit.

Balance the top down management control and bottom up ideas creation: More organizations will make a bold step—reengineer or redesign the old fashioned management control, and focus on “nurturing innovation” in a structural way. It means managing people well and as technology develops, creating the right mix of automation and creativity. Therefore, innovation leaders should think outside the box and drive a view into the future, develop an understanding of future skills gaps, and take a systematic approach to the art of innovation management. A collection of people who think innovatively can adapt instantly, who give the company a competitive edge.

The winning companies continuously invest in their team’s skills (technical, professional, and leadership) and balance control and autonomy. Instead of relying on innovation management dictated from the top, organizations will be populated with knowledge workers who leverage collaboration platforms and tools to create fresh ideas in conjunction with each other, thereby radically disrupting organizational structures, hierarchy, and job titles, generating informal structures or teams to enforce innovation. Companies which outperform their competitors often because they have a flexible work environment, highly engaging workforce, deeper skills, a stronger innovation culture, wise investment in leadership and talent development and innovation management excellence.

The dynamic innovation perspective and creative balances allow the organization to morph into living conditions and organizational capacities change to allow a better fit for the purpose. Highly innovative companies can manage both hard and soft elements well, deal with above tensions and paradoxes effectively in order to make breakthrough progress and drive a digital paradigm shift effortlessly.



0 comments:

Post a Comment