Innovation Index, Alignment, Indicator

The good or bad innovation would depend on the business’s attitude to nourish a culture of creativity and its aptitude to manage innovation. 

Innovations in the digital era are coming at a seemingly much fast pace, more data, more changes, and more potential disruptions, and therefore, innovation management also becomes more complex and volatile, and often a multi-disciplinary effort. Innovation happens when you change the game or you bring the different twist to what is currently perceived or established. There are breakthrough innovations and incremental innovations. It's natural to fear the unknown or be skeptical of the unproven. A truly innovative "story of the future" can literally revolutionize a culture which is the collective minds and habits, align innovation processes, select innovation indicators and improve innovation success rate.

Innovation culture index actually measures the ability of people to be innovative: The art of innovation is that it involves new ways of bringing together ideas and resources to create something novel and generate value. Changing the culture is the mindset, if you want an innovative culture, it’s important to empower innovators, hire, retain, and recognize innovators who can help the organization shape the culture of creativity and develop an open and optimal environment for innovation.

Innovation culture index actually measures the ability of people to be innovative. Who can come up with the new ideas? Then, who can implement them? Who will embrace change, who will fight it? Top talent with interdisciplinary knowledge and the right dose of “gut feeling” supported by good logic enables them to capture the flash of ideas or unique insight, learn to "think differently," think positively, think fun, or think beyond their reach. “Innovative culture influencers” should encourage out of the box thinking, have vision and leadership competency to stimulate creative energy and maximize innovation at all levels in the organization.

Innovation alignments: Innovation can be viewed as consisting of many different stages. Some processes are more structured than others in innovation management. The key elements in systematic innovation include people, strategy, process, tool, and culture, missing any one of them will severely impact the sustainability of intentional innovation management effort. What’s very rigorous and systematic is the analysis of business issues, opportunities, or marketing dilemmas, etc. Innovation alignment means you have to understand business problems thoroughly, enforce cross-boundary communication, deal with business conflicts, maintain and fix any imbalance in key business elements such as people, process, and technology, and update structures, methodologies, and cultures to improve decision effectiveness.

Businesses fail at innovation execution because they have no clear processes, nor understand the linkage required to work horizontally. The main barriers to innovation are silo, rigidity, inflexibility or bureaucracy, etc. It actually needs to break down outdated rules or inflexible processes and take a systematic approach with robust processes to management innovation.

Innovation alignment requires continuous business optimization through a serious amount of positive communication whilst continuously looking for dynamic processes, tightening coordination and collaboration with business partners. Innovation process could be very loose on purpose. It takes systematic effort within a company to embrace fresh thinking, leverage powerful digital information technologies, cultivate an innovative culture, and manage innovation in a structural way.

Innovation indicator: Historically, performance measurement systems for most businesses have been financing driven and often stifles innovation. Not every improvement effort is innovation, but innovation should always be sort of improvement. There are leading indicators and lagging indicators for innovation management. For example, measuring the contributing value of your new products or innovations as either revenue or preferably profit to your overall value. Some factors that could be used to measure innovation score within a company could be human and financial resources invested, employees motivation with top management encouragement and support, challenging activities being involved, level of autonomy, number of innovation initiatives being launched, % of new product/service contribution to total value, capacity/potential to innovate, or the level of past innovation performance measures, etc.

The goal is to show how the pieces of measurement data directly or indirectly affect business productivity, performance, and profitability. Incomplete assessment of measurement variables would mislead the management making ineffective decisions or focus on short-term business results only. Irrelevant measurement indicators will waste time, add the other layer of management complexity, and decrease the business effectiveness.

The good or bad innovation would depend on the business’s attitude to nourish a culture of creativity and its aptitude to manage innovation. Because the evolution of innovation only exists in a more open environment or ecosystem that creates unique insight, take advantage of all sources of creativity in a more open way and manage a balanced innovation portfolio with a right mix of incremental innovations and breakthrough innovations. At the level of innovation maturity, different types of innovation should be managed via tailored management processes, helping the organization adapt, improve, grow, and integrate, develop a healthy innovation portfolio with both breakthrough and incremental innovation mix and nurture an ever-evolving innovation system effectively.

Posted in: Innovation