Innovation

If idea generation sometimes is more art than science, then innovation management is more science than art.

Innovation is the management process to transform great ideas and achieve their commercial value. Organizations can no longer rely on a single individual or team to drive innovation, largely due to the fact that innovating in today’s digital world has become increasingly complex in nature. Ideas take root in unsuspected places and they evolve with time and by unexpected connections. 

It’s important to build a process of a corporate pulse that helps to identify where the passion, motivation, or commitment of the organization lies, who embodies it, and how to build an innovative environment in which people are given free space to be creative without rigid structures to hold them back. Apply interdisciplinary management to strike the right balance of knowledge and imagination, process and creativity, and improve innovation effectiveness.

Innovation complexity has to be reduced to actionable, overriding variables, which must be managed: The organizational management innovation is based on the varying factors, such as the vision of leadership, diversity of teams, speed of decision-making, attitude toward risk, how effective for the allocation of resources; what’s the altitude of innovation impact and the aptitude to manage innovation; how efficient of the innovation processes or lack thereof; when to follow the digital principles, and when to break rules.

Good ideas are multi-dimensional, so execution also needs forces of both "push and pull." Technically, there is an effective feedback mechanism, and there is transparency in follow-up of a system of the innovation process from idea developing up to implementing, to gain management and peer recognition. There are different views of business innovation and evolution. Always challenge your own thinking by asking questions which often lead to discovering situations others do not see at first, gain an understanding of nonlinearity as the very characteristic of innovation management.

The commitment from the top is very important for any change or innovation to be successful: There is a variety of innovation, and there are different philosophies and practices to build innovation competencies of the company. Is there any fundamentally different approach that would provide more flexibility, more sensitivity, and more responsiveness? Etc It’s important to explore opportunities for transformational business directions and improve the long-term viability of the business. Therefore, innovation leadership is critical to identify and close innovation strategy gaps, develop a common understanding of it, encourage innovation and advocate changes.

Innovation needs vision and strong discipline. To gain full awareness of both opportunities and risks, we must see where we are going; we need to see what is behind us, but not at the cost of losing our visibility forward. The first sign of a good innovation leader is that he/she will recognize their limitations and build a team to complement their quality and capability. So they should have their own constitutional innovation personas, with the pattern of required behaviors to face the emerging situation and succeed.

With each flavor of "innovation," the risk is involved. The more disruptive or radical the innovation is, the greater the risk would be: People would like to take calculated risks in experimenting with a new way to do things, as well as having the business model they create to get it done. Some risks can be quantifiable; some can only be approximated. There is no “one size fits all” innovation approach, it’s important to step away from the accepted "best practice" and ask tough questions to dig through the root causes of issues, fix or prevent potential problems timely.

From the birth of a concept and the process of turning it into a reality, lack of the culture of learning and risk tolerance should be blamed for stifling innovation. Failure should not be an offense and actually if there are not a few failures, and then you are not trying hard enough. Learn the lessons, do not make failures happening too frequently or too expensive. Innovation management takes a balancing act to have enough failure and an environment that encourages critical thinking, learning from failures quickly and cheaply,

If idea generation sometimes is more art than science, then innovation management is more science than art. In order to build a global innovative company, businesses need to expand their horizon through connecting wider dots and orchestrating broader collaboration. This is accompanied by growing global diversity and developing culture empathy, taking the different scenarios as an input for innovation strategy, believing in yourself and most importantly in your team to achieve the high performing result consistently.

Posted in: Innovation