Innovationconnectivity

Businesses need people who are passionate about exploring new opportunities to awaken innovation and build competitive business advantage

Innovation is about thinking creatively and discovering alternative ways to solve problems. Digital is the age of innovation. Innovation is what leads to differentiation. There are many ways to differentiate and, therefore, there are many ways to pursue innovation.

To be an innovator of tomorrow, people or businesses have to keep learning, reflecting, updating their mindsets, knowledge, methodology, and approaches, becoming more adaptive, creating alternative ways of working, solving problems, and leading breakthrough transformation.

Innovation & reflection: Being innovative is a state of mind to keep coming up with great ideas and fresh viewpoints. It is, by nature, unique to each person. A self-reflecting mind continues to practice reflective thinking; understand yourselves and how to know who you are and your own style of thinking, responding, and interacting with surroundings. The process of reflection is the foundation of growth, learning, improvement, refinement and progress. Innovators present creatively disruptive traits, disrupt old ways, and inspire better ways to do things. Self-reflection and self-awareness provides clarity, gives you directional opportunities for personal growth and helps you focus on creative thinking and improvement.

There are many thought processes in creativity, but being mindful doesn’t mean you make your brain saturated or keep your hands always busy, on the contrary, you need to take time for being quiet, doing self-awareness and self-reflection. In order to be innovative, it’s critical to open your mind, expand your lens to understand things, people, as well as the interconnectivity between them. The world we see is dependent on the lens of proximity, the openness of mind and the perception of eyes. Some perceive the world as black and white, others see the full spectrum of color. It further reflects into our inner world, to discern and shape our viewpoints. Innovators demonstrate the very characteristics of vision, character, authenticity, creativity, empathy, humility, and wisdom. The world they perceive is more diversified, dynamic and hyper-connected for connecting dots and nurturing creativity.

Innovation & paradox: Innovation has the characteristic of paradox, the paradox is the result of two opposing truths existing side by side, which can be both right. There is a paradox in innovation management. Standardization is inside-the-box, and innovation is outside-the-box. Hence, organizations indeed need both, and in fact, cannot really exist without healthy leverage of both. Dealing with innovation paradox is also about how to strike the right balance of pushing and pulling, quick win and long term perspective.

Innovation is the process that can be managed, thus, it needs a set of principles and practices. The paradox is that all creative activities are subversive in questioning the status quo. Thinking outside the box is all about "rule breaking"; the more "unruly" you are, the more creative you are. Setting rules and goals for creativity goes against the very nature of creativity and innovation. Thus, it’s important to balance order and chaos, think critically, independently and in an out-of-box way. But also develop innovation principles in association with practices in a field of innovation activities and forming its content as an intellectual management discipline.

Innovation & adaptability: Adaptive thinking is an open mind that is able to adjust its thinking processes according to changes in its environment, or a learning mind to absorb all necessary knowledge and abstract it into insight and come up with creativity. Develop adaptability through openness, be able to seek ways and means of adjusting your perspective and those around you. Innovators have more balanced or adaptive personalities to fit in different circumstances by absorbing new knowledge-gain true understanding-capture insight-create new ideas.

Self-adaptation is faster if made with the full involvement of people in organizational flow with the consciousness to change and get ideas all the time. It is possible to see what enables a self-adaptive organism is an information-driven process feeding and sustaining it. So collectively, the digital organizations can self-discover, self-adaptive, self-organize. and self-renew, act intelligently and nimble enough to become more innovative.

Businesses need people who are passionate about exploring new opportunities to awaken innovation and build competitive business advantage. Hence, they should spot and recognize their innovators who can rise above the status quo, take on a new set of activities that have them involved in the strategy development process, and maximize the full potential of the digital organization.

Posted in: Innovation