Wednesday, February 10, 2021

Innovation-retrosynthesis

Retrosynthesis is a type of business logic for innovation, problem-solving or capability management.


Innovation is not serendipity, but a managed process to transform novel ideas and achieve their business value. Retrosynthesis describes the process of planning a synthesis backward, by starting at the ideal products; and then taking it back a step at a time. 

From a problem-solving perspective, retrosynthesis is the process started whenever people start applying the scientific method of observing, creating hypotheses and taking retrosynthesis procedures to approve or disprove those hypotheses, keep trace back to the root cause of the problem in order to come up with premium solutions.

Many business leaders take the “backward” approach to reach the well defined vision by leveraging the retrosynthesis scenario: It starts with what they want to see or have, reimagine the future of the business; then, think backward from there to what the next simpler step is; creating hypotheses and prove them; then back to what are the next simpler components, and then, back to what they have at hand. It is important to leverage varying processes such as analysis, synthesis, and retrosynthesis at the different phases of innovation management.

More accurately, there are both backward (from product or outcome of components) and forwards (from materials or resources at hand) at the same time for creating or innovating. To streamline innovation as a management process and enforce retrosynthesis procedure, companies need to fine-tune the underlying organizational structures, optimize organizational processes, and break through the industrial constraints and limitations, in order to create innovative products/services and improve innovation success rate.

Applying retrosynthesis to problem-solving means working it forward and then backward to make sure there are no errors or gaps: Many of today’s problems are complex, problem-solving capabilities evolve and move from the fundamental level to differentiated levels between categories based on the technology evolution or business driver. Thus, oftentimes, complex problem-solving requires introspective, retrospective, and technospective for capturing upcoming trends, gaining an in-depth understanding of the problem, and coming up with logical solutions without causing more issues.

In practice, the multiple perspectives of innovative problem-solving include scope, status, talent (creative mindset), resources, processes, information technology, etc. During the retrospective problem-solving scenario, the business management teams reflect on what happened in the iteration, make sure there are no errors or gaps, and identify actions for improvement going forward. It’s about making continuous improvement. There should always, at every turn, be a taste of better days, of continual improvement of retrospective action planning, and incremental goal achieving.

Business capability mapping is also a sort of retrosynthesis scenario to improve strategy management effectiveness: Organizational capability mapping is the activity of making "reference links" between each capability in a "relevant subset" to specific processes, people (roles or teams), tools, and information. It starts with the realization of the gaps where you currently no longer can deliver the strategic business objective for your company and shareholders. It involves capability mapping at the strategic level, perhaps you also have to go down to a second-tier, or even a third tier, at the operational level, to get to the point where there is enough differentiation between capabilities that you can build, and then, map between capability and capacity, as well as map against different roles in the organization or available resources to achieve business objectives.

Capabilities include dependencies, one is part of another or depends on another. So capability mapping also includes capability dependency identification, to ensure capability portfolio coherence. The value of capability maps is the ability to identify capability “patterns” of the enterprise to make holistic investment decisions and apply a retrosynthetic approach to improve strategy management. After completing mapping, you then take information about those mapped elements and bring them together in one or more formulas in order to make a generalization about the capability and make continuous deliveries.

Retrosynthesis is a type of business logic for innovation, problem-solving or capability tuning and management. And logic is to make an appropriate order - arrange, rearrange, or shuffle up, to solve problems in the right sequence and achieve expected consequences.


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