Tuesday, February 23, 2021

Good Principles, Outdated Rules of Innovation

Innovations simply benefit from being developed and subsequently commercialized in a more open ecosystem.

Innovation is a journey which involves brainstorming, experimentation, trial, error, research, applying structured methods or tools for implementation, reviews, systematic analysis, and debugging, and is therefore not possible to pre-describe how it will work out.

 Therefore, organizations can no longer rely on a single individual or team to drive innovation. The businesses need innovation silver lining from specific tools rising to an overall problem-solving system environment. The evolution of innovation only exists in a dynamic environment that creates insight and takes advantage of all sources of creativity in an open way and leaps up innovation maturity.

Innovation management processes should enable us to focus on the most attractive opportunities: With “VUCA” new normal, we cannot predict anything beforehand but can imagine with many experiences involved in current or in the past. Innovation happens frictionlessly in an open environment, the emerging markets perhaps also offer particularly fertile ground for exploring innovation opportunities and developing a dynamic innovation ecosystem. Effective innovation management structures creative processes, gets information to bridge knowledge gaps, enables us to foresee business possibilities and focuses on the most attractive opportunities in order to get better results.

There is more flow of creative ideas, the more is happening, the pie gets bigger. The economic environment plays an important role in sparking creativity and catalyzing innovation. It is crucial to see the context, perceive invisible, identify the leverage point of the ever evolving digital ecosystem, allow the organization to explore emerging opportunities and scale up innovation systematically. The more integrated and culturally based innovation or imagination is, the more sustainable and productive such initiatives are, the better chance organizations can reap the benefits and unlock the full business potential.

Externally simple is directly proportional to internally complex when designing and implementing intuitive products/services: The digital era upon us is about people-centricity. Innovation has a certain level of complexity, but keeps things simple, not simpler. Remove the layers of complexity to reach what is simple at the core. Champion the intuitive solutions to delight customers as an important dimension to innovate. The management needs to ask around and collect customers’ feedback such as: How is the end user going to use your solution? Does the new solution help users do their work better than the current solution or do users all together have to change the way they perform their tasks by using the new system? Is the user interface delightful? Etc. Keep in mind, often the business goals of doing innovation is to either delight customers or improve management effectiveness via providing intuitive products/services, clarified processes or step-wise scenarios.

Intuition is a deeper sense which gets activated only if we are aligned with nature and the present. Technically, hiding the complexity of information technology, what is left visible to the customer should be simple, intuitive, secure, reliable and predictable and easy to use. Pursuing the art of possible involves new ways of bringing together ideas and resources to create something novel, achieve business objectives in any way possible. Take calculated risks to explore new opportunities hidden in the volatile and uncertain business environment, and delight customers via products or services with cool design and intuitive interface.

Set good principles, but break down outdated rules: Innovation challenges the status quo, do something better than it currently is. That is important in a healthy, innovative organization. To become creative, you would have to break down some old rules. Rules are about safeguarding the status quo. Consequently, too rigid rules will stifle innovation. The principle-based innovation is not about setting the restricted rules for stifling creativity; it’s about framing and prioritizing the innovation management effort in order to stay focused and improve the success rate of innovation.

With information exponentiality and high velocity, rules need to be updated continually. After breaking the outdated rules, you are "outside the box." Thinking outside the box is all about "rule breaking"; the more "unruly" you are, the more creative you are. You apply principles of approach and vary the resource and tool mix by the ever-changing environment. The right level of guide and process is important, but the overly rigid process or too ‘pushy’ goals will stifle innovation. The guiding principle is like the light tower, navigates people or organizations toward the right direction, speeds up innovation efforts and reaches a well-planned destination.

Innovations simply benefit from being developed and subsequently commercialized in a more open ecosystem, striking the multitude of digital balances which impact with each other in order to achieve a state of flow, a state of zest, and a state of harmonization. It’s important to note that innovation is a collaborative effort across multiple organizational silos, and it needs to be managed systematically to improve its success rate.


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