Innovation & Value-added Ecosystem

 With ecosystem involvement, companies will become more open to diverse opinions and feedback, be more people -centric, and become more resilient to failure forward. 

As businesses get more cut-throat in the hyper-connected digital environment, innovation is the “must have” business differentiator. Innovation often happens at the intersections of people and systems. In fact, business and economic environment play an important role in sparking creativity and catalyzing innovation. 

An open business system is value added to create a dynamic, expansive, and interdependent methodological environment with a set of multifaceted practices to catalyze innovation. People need to be the center of outcome-driven innovation management and they are the major focus for innovation processes and accomplishment. 

Professional philosophy: Innovation is a process to transform novel ideas to achieve their business value. In essence, innovation management is about how to manage people, assets, time, resources, and risks to achieve high-performance business goals. To manage innovation systematically, organizations develop a framework for schools of innovative thoughts, strike the right balance of theories and practices, trying the different combinations of old or new things, embracing a fresh concept that you may have never imagined, connecting wider dots to trigger innovation, and make continuous deliveries.

Highly innovative companies develop innovation philosophy and make it the part of the DNA of the business for improving employee engagement and customer satisfaction. Innovation philosophy comprises innovation logic, aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology, etc. Philosophy can allow people to see things holistically, understand the business culture- collective mindset, attitude, and footprint, pose the most important question that can be asked; questions that lie well beyond the bounds of any other science, and give the freedom of thoughts that makes the paradigm changes possible.

Collaborative methodology: Due to the fact that innovating in today’s digital world has become increasingly complex in nature, it’s usually a collaborative effort, especially the large scale innovations require mass collaboration across the business ecosystem. Methodologically, there are robust processes and tools that enable a company to generate winning concepts for innovation management on a consistent basis and via an iterative approach, layout different cognitive processes, structures, and functions, combine all that is available to them for unleashing business potential in imaginative, adventurous ways. To innovate systematically requires much more time, energy, passion, courage, experimentation, retreat, and reflection to get clear and focused on innovative ideas, business models, processes or solutions, and to then enact, embody and execute in a collaborative and disciplined way.

Instead of being overly rigidly grouped around a specific function or business, an enriched innovation ecosystem enables systematic innovation management, engages in multi-industrial collaborations, and draws together mutually supportive companies from multiple industries that collectively seek to create the differentiated value they could not reach alone. It shapes up a methodological environment that should cover the whole innovation process in managing ideas or idea handling systems to idea implementation & promotion, and fully cover a wide enough direction such as cost optimization, waste reduction, quality improvement, capability orchestration, or problem-solving, etc.

Multifaceted practice: Innovation best practices enable the organizations to expand and scale up innovation practices and effects in the digital ecosystem. They are not for making static or rigid processes, but about setting the principles and standards to amplify innovation effects and achieve innovation management excellence with agility and flexibility. Avoid mechanical thinking of the best practices. Not every innovative company uses every best practice. Not every authority agrees on every best practice. The best practices are not universal, especially for innovation. Perhaps it is a better approach to strive for using good practice - good for a certain organization and for the specific situation and challenges that are faced and that actually requires different priorities as compared to others.

The ultimate innovation isn't what you do; it's what you deliver for results to delight customers, and how being innovative becomes the state of mind. With effective tools or methodologies, the best practice can be used wisely and with the expertise to really drive value-added innovation. Do not take the innovation theories or best practices as absolute truth, some innovation theories are outdated somehow. With the increasing pace of organizational changes and digital disruptions, new innovation practices continue to be developed and there should always be an objective to become even better. In fact, best practices should change and evolve over time. The real challenge is to understand where and how you can and should improve to get the biggest effect, and how to keep developing the next practices for benefiting the widest possible audience within the organizational ecosystem.

The dynamic digital ecosystem can be perceived through the lenses of sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, organizational and communication sciences, etc. People become the center of innovation management and they are the major focus for innovation process and accomplishment. With ecosystem involvement, companies will become more open to diverse opinions and feedback, be more people -centric, and be more resilient to failure forward. The evolution of innovation only exists in more open environments or the ecosystem that create insight, take advantage of all sources of creativity in a more open way and make a leap of innovation management to the next level of maturity.

Posted in: Innovation