Innovationcharacteristics

Surviving and thriving upon exponential growth of information, fierce competitions, and continuous disruptions requires innovativeness, flexibility, interdisciplinarity, and resilience.

Digital is the era of innovation. Being innovative is about overcoming the “we always do things like that” mentality and figuring out different ways to do things. Organizational innovativeness is the unique competency of the business. 

Developing people’s innovative mindset and business innovation competency raise different "learning" issues that organizations must deal with smoothly. Businesses today have to make strategic choices all the time about where and when and how they innovate, putting emphasis on identifying, developing the innovative characteristics and building the unique innovation advantage. 

Logic: Being innovative is a state of mind. Creativity is an innate process to generate novel ideas. Sometimes, people overly focus on the aha moment effect. In fact, there is lots of learning, understanding and logical reasoning behind creativity. Cognitively, creativity is a complex, multifaceted thought process such as association, perspective shifting, opposites, etc, which involves logical reasoning in it. Logic is the clue thresholding components of great ideas or connecting the interdisciplinary dots to spur innovation. There is mutual reinforcement between creativity and logic. Creativity is often based on unique insight; insight is captured from information, information is based on data, and data can be scrutinized by insightful questions initiated by creative mindset.

We live in an over-complex and informative world, one cannot keep flexing their creative muscle without continuously learning new knowledge, analyzing and reasoning. Collectively, innovation is often the team work, creative individuals need to express their creativity via analytical communication in order to get understood or implement the ideas by following the logical scenario. Businesses need to become more innovative, at the same time, clarify the logic at different stages of innovation management in order to build a set of unique organizational competencies to thrive in the future.

Inclusiveness: Business working environment today is diversified in many aspects such as diversified talent, the mixed bag of old and new technology, the exponential growth of information, the varying management disciplines and practices. Having an inclusive culture always helps people learn from diverse people, engages them to share ideas, as well as transform the best ideas to achieve business value. In the global organization, what about the understanding of cultural competencies in other regions. Inclusion is the very characteristic of a competitive and innovative team in which everyone feels comfortable sharing ideas and thoughts because everyone has a different perspective based on their cognitive difference, different life experiences, and cultural values.

Even though people have different intent, personality traits, working styles, effective inclusion efforts can bridge innovation gaps and build a complementary team to generate creative results regularly. A highly mature digital organization is both high- intelligent and highly-innovative, developing a right organizational culture so that digital savvy people can take ownership to get the work done in their way, and tap their creative potential freely. Cross the industrial boundaries, organizations have grown from looking at diversity & inclusion as a "check-the-box" compliance tool to understanding that having a wide range of opinions and viewpoints contributes directly to both top line business growth in terms of innovation and the bottom line in terms of productivity and profitability. Inclusiveness is a delight.

Coorpetition (corporation + competition): The very characteristic of innovation is about figuring out alternative ways to do things. When every business or function does exactly the same thing, then innovation soon becomes the commodity. Therefore, do not take the innovation theories or best practices as absolute truth. It’s always important to create your own innovation formulas, encourage idea sharing and coordination. Highly innovative enterprises proactively develop the information-savvy and resource-rich innovation hubs and hyperconnected digital clusters across enterprise ecosystems for enabling idea flow and creating synergy to growth. It’s important to break down the variety of silos and harness cross-functional, industrial, and cultural collaboration and innovation.

Besides fostering collaboration, advocate healthy competition. There are many reasons to compete, and there are many ways to compete. Healthy competition inspires innovation and progression; unprofessional competition protects the status quo. Business leaders should set principles and disciplines to discern the positive motivation or negative energy behind the competition. Healthy competition shouldn’t mean we want to be the same; it means to be authentic and self-aware, either at the individual or organizational level, to tap your creative potential, become the best you can be, and to define your own innovation success formula.

Surviving and thriving upon exponential growth of information, fierce competitions, and continuous disruptions requires innovativeness, flexibility, interdisciplinarity, and resilience. It needs a clear vision to inspire and imagination to spark. The companies who get the most from innovation efforts have the right ambition, good leadership, effective processes, talented people, and open culture, so they can build differentiated innovation competency and drive progressive breakthroughs.

Posted in: Innovation