Innovation

Digital innovation has a broader spectrum, hybrid nature, and deep context.

The digital era upon us is about people, innovation, option, empathy, or simply put, "personalization." Providing personalized services or solutions to its customers will become the new normal to run a people-centric organization.

 In the digital era, what the business needs is not only faster speed, but also a hyper-connected ecosystem with information/process synchronization and collaboration-driven relationship harmony. That great personalization leads to better understanding by designing tailored applications or solutions to meet people’s needs and improve customer satisfaction.

Compare & contrast: Creativity is about connecting dots. Good idea generation and evaluation is a critical part of successful new product or business development. To accelerate innovation, it is important to involve diverse talent, create an environment that brings together the people from inside and outside of the company in a collaborative way; build the capacity to hold alternative mind-generated possibilities simultaneously, and then use various criteria to compare and contrast them against unfolding reality, broadening perspectives of complex circumstances, forming unique viewpoints and generate fresh ideas via analysis and synthesis processes.

There is a variety of innovation; efficient processes are used or should be used for incremental innovation, radical innovation, in contrast, requires visionary, divergence, and some other attributes that are seldom found in people’s concerns, needs, and frustration. To stimulate thought-provoking debates and improve innovation success rate, business leaders not only ask the right questions but rather, absorb information, forecast business potentials, risks, and benefits; mitigate, compare and contrast options, facts, assess the various "innovation activities" they perform, and the information that they need. The evaluation questions may include: quantitative estimate of customer value and voice, technical feasibility, performance targets (technical and cost), commercial feasibility (business model, channel to marketplace), business case and value forecast, competitive technologies, GRC concerns, etc. It is important to use the same main parameters, compare and contrast, build a balanced innovation portfolio with the right mix of flavors.

Clarify & connect: In nature, everything is connected with something else. Creativity needs vision to inspire and imagination to spark. Often connectivity triggers creativity and the creative mind has a better ability to connect dots. For solving any problems innovatively, always try to understand this side, that side, as well as the interaction of both sides. Leaders and managers should continue clarifying: What business problem is a business initiative funded to solve? What are alternative solutions? How are responsibilities and assignments allocated to various layers of management/engineering discipline? To break down the silo mentality and communication bottleneck, it’s important to observe, listen, and collect feedback, to truly understand people and things with empathy and clarity in order to come up with innovative solutions.

Creativity is a creative mix of action artifacts and biological or personality characteristics. Being innovative is the mind with the thinking process that holds onto its natural connectivity while being prepared to connect the dots even in the opposite direction should they make sense to generate fresh insight. To be creative, you need to be conscious, curious about things that surround you; be aware and engaged with both the inner world of thought, feeling, choice, and the exterior world of experience and relationship. The interaction between these two parts of our existence is the home of our creativity. Collaboratively, focusing on communicating the insight is the key to restore innovation.

Create, choose with confidence: Whether we know it consciously or not, we are always making a choice. Still, we can't control the outcome of our choices consciously or subconsciously. Business users and consumers are selective nowadays due to the unprecedented convenience brought by digital technologies. Thus, the customer including prospects should be studied, observed, and get involved in innovation processes. It’s important to provide choices for them on how to solve their issues by listening to their feedback, deliver intuitive products/services to meet their needs. The more customer contact points an organization has, the more difficult it is to meet and hopefully deliver on customers' expectations. Personalization is the process of making a company's products and services extraordinarily relevant to the wants, needs or desires of customers - physically, spiritually or emotionally.

Awareness is fundamental to choice. Choice with full awareness is the freedom from the conditioned circumstances. Imagine the true meaning when you say "Teamwork." Giving everyone a voice in how the organization and the people in it can prosper and thrive. Today’s business leaders, especially in the consumer intensive industry need to become “Choice Generators,” provide choices for users and customers on how to solve their issues from their lens; provide choices for talented employees on how they would like to get the work done efficiently. They have to not only provide clear process guidelines but also see that the teams are embracing cross-functional collaboration and taking people-centric effort. Perhaps by pursuing abundant choices and options, we are shifting from the knowledge economy to the creative economy.

Digital innovation has a broader spectrum, hybrid nature, and deep context. You have to systematically develop the business competency to execute it successfully. There is a logic behind any innovation effort, and it's important to manage innovation systematically. Digital innovation management is a system that can be fine-tuned in a structured way to improve its success rate.

Posted in: Creativity,Innovation