Innovationcapability

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 capabilities.

Innovation is to transform fresh ideas to achieve their commercial value for benefiting the widest possible audience within the organizational ecosystem. 

Innovation is what leads to differentiation; it involves new ways of bringing together ideas and resources to create something novel and differentiate the organization from competitors. It is a unique business capability to enable business growth and lead breakthrough business transformation.

Nonlinear and modular innovation capability: The digital innovation capability is modular, dynamic, and nonlinear, having many visible and invisible business elements for improving organizational competency. The unique business competency differentiates your organization from competitors. There are both hard ingredients such as people, process, knowledge, technology, etc, and soft elements such as communication and culture in building a set of strong business capabilities. To make wise investment on innovation capability development, describe business goals, scope, outcomes, technical capabilities within scope, approach, costs, time frames, risks, etc, as capability design must fit inside very strict business constraints, make it truly underpin a well-defined innovation strategy.

In practice, capabilities, especially at the integral level may include dependencies, one is part of another or depends on another. It’s important to gain insight into the condition and relationship or dependency of capabilities to improve capability coherence and maturity, and focus on building long-term professional competency. Top executives need to take a strategic perspective and identify the innovation patterns of the company, make the management view of the condition/suitability/adequacy/viability of innovation capability of the companies to improve innovation management effectiveness.

Lightweight processes allow creativity and innovation to flow, get protected, channeled and nurtured: Innovation capability and process are two viewpoints of building an innovative organization. An organization has innovation capability to deliver outcomes; an organization executes processes to deliver an output. A loosely structured, lightweight process allows companies to connect with the various points of the spiral in different ways vertically or horizontally, to connect the right dots, and spur innovation all the time. Processes Management is a “constructor” to build innovation capability portfolios.

Most companies fail at innovation execution because they have no clear processes, nor understand the structure and linkage required to work horizontally or penetrate vertically to manage innovation. A defined process or structure is essential to manage innovation effectively. However, the systems/processes/ technology many organizations are using to capture innovation value are becoming inefficient. When the processes of innovation management are overly restricted, sometimes innovation becomes the “hammer in search of a nail,” diminishing creativity, and stifling ideas flow. To improve innovation effectiveness, there is the mechanism to collect feedback and there is transparency in the follow-up system of the innovation process from the idea up to implementation, to gain management and peer recognition.

Innovation is the development of a new combination of available resources, in a way that solves real-world problems in a more suitable way: Oftentimes, the enterprise capability design and configuration is uniquely challenging because of resource limitations or other business constraints. Resources include technological, financial, reputational, market structure and institutional assets, etc. Innovation management needs to break down resource bottlenecks and manage a well-rounded innovation portfolio effectively and efficiently.

Business management should make an objective assessment of their resource availability and allocation. The resource needs to be assigned scientifically, to make sure that your company has a steady flow of fresh ideas floating in your innovation pipeline, and you can identify the best of the best, allocate resources to grow them into fruity. How resource allocation is determined should be understood by all-important business parties, take advantage of resources effectively, optimize cost, set priority, keep process transparent, and bridge talent gaps to improve innovation management maturity.

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 capabilities. The ultimate innovation isn't what you do; it's what you deliver for premium results to delight customers, and how being innovative becomes the state of mind and core differentiator of the business.

Posted in: Enterprise Capability,Innovation