Innovation is not serendipity, it is a management process and business competency.
Innovation navigation: Due to the increasing pace of changes, innovation can happen anywhere across the organization and its ecosystem. To develop unique innovation competency, it’s important to craft a good innovation strategy and build a powerful innovation navigation system that involves tapping the organization's ecosystem for capturing opportunities to innovate. The real challenge is to understand where and how you can and should innovate to get the biggest effect and scale up the best innovation practices across the digital ecosystem effortlessly. Thus, innovation navigators are the critical role to envision the future trends and capture potential innovation opportunities. Through great navigation, a healthy innovation portfolio can be integrated with the annual strategic planning process and financial investment model.
Where are innovation hotspots? Innovation happens in which the business interacts with customers; or at the intersection between business and information technology, etc. Focusing on customers' needs should be an easier path to grow the innovation fruit. People-centric innovation is in strong demand because digital is the age of choice. To explore great ideas and discover opportunities to innovate, the robust process and tools that enable any entity to generate winning concepts for innovation management on a consistent basis, is the prerequisite for sustaining long term business advantage and growth. Insightful innovation management continues to clarify: Do we really need innovation, who will be held responsible, what will be the cost, risk, and ROI?
Innovation portfolio: It is a strategic imperative to develop the organizational level innovation competency. Organizations need to have a balanced portfolio of innovation projects, across the matrix of different types of innovations (incremental, substantial, breakthrough). Incremental innovation generally brings short-term value additions but breakthrough innovation differs from incremental innovation to be a "game changer." Generally speaking, all businesses should have a handful of "bets" in the breakthrough innovation category due to its high potential to lift the business up to the next level of organizational growth. It’s also important to fine-tune many critical business factors, including “hard” factors such as policy, process, practice, performance, and “soft” factors such as culture, leadership, communication, etc, to shape innovation capacity of the business.
In reality, innovation fails because many organizations lack a cohesive strategy or a systematic approach to manage both opportunities and risks in a structural way. It’s important to identify innovation capacity bottlenecks, such as resource limitation, process ineffectiveness, skills deficiency, or culture inertia, etc. Bridging innovation execution gap to achieving the business objectives requires a logical execution scenario with well-set decision-making parameters, performance thresholds, and adaptive, iterative experiential processes, etc, as part of the wider holistic system for innovation, encompassing other key aspects such as culture, leadership, and strategy, etc. Build a focused but balanced innovation portfolio that maximizes the output from the innovation team, in terms of adding value to the organization by delivering alternative solutions to the aforementioned attribute and building differentiated innovation competency.
Innovation culture and talent: Innovation success depends on many factors, people are always the most critical one. It’s critical to cultivate a compelling future vision, a culture which inspires creativity, accepts external ideas and rapidly integrates them into a holistic idea/innovation management system. The difficult challenge is not just launching successful teams, but maintaining the motivation and focus of the people. It requires much more time, energy, passion, courage, experimentation, practices, retreat, reflection. Only in an open trusting space, creativity can flow smoothly and innovation can be catalyzed effortlessly. The appropriately configured innovation platform creates a scalable means for brainstorming, designing and building ideas throughout the enterprise. The evolution of innovation only exists in the more open environments that create insights, take advantage of all sources of creativity in a more open way. As a result, innovation becomes a persistent, shared reality even across silos and geographies.
During the whole innovation process, make sure that all staff are aware of the planning, processes, schedules, or potential pitfalls, and they are ready for taking responsibilities of building innovation competency, either individually or collectively. From innovation talent management perspective, the emergent digital technologies and practices make it possible to expand the talent pool, build highly innovative teams with coherent diversification from cognitive difference to complimentary experiences & skillsets. To evaluate innovative potential, it’s also important to define the updated competency model, assess the talent's overall capability to solve problems, strike the right balance of cognitive difference, learning plasticity, characters, skills, experiences, personalities, and energy within the teams.
Innovation is not serendipity, it is a management process and business competency. Environment either encourages or discourages innovation, the ease or difficulties inherent in surviving. From the pre-planning stage to post-implementation check-up, innovation management should continue to take different scenarios, handle innovation streams for different goals and different time frames, create new value, even become a game changer, for broadening the “innovation scope” and focusing on building a healthy innovation portfolio to establish differentiated business competency, position a strong business brand, and reach the next level of organizational maturity.
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