Innovation

Innovation involves new ways of bringing together ideas and resources to create something novel and then transform those novel ideas to achieve business value.

Innovation is not serendipity, but a management process and discipline. The broader the scope, scale, and impact of the change, the more one leans towards calling such change an innovation. Applying discipline to innovation is to figure out how to manage innovation in a structural way.

 Digital innovation has a broader spectrum and comes in many flavors; there are many opportunities in an enterprise to do so, innovation implies high return and high risks, etc. The essence of innovation is made of trying new combinations of known things or leveraging the variety of perspectives, methodologies, practices, etc., initiate thought-provoking conversations, to achieve high performance results.

Shift the “bits and bytes” talk to innovative conversation: The big concern in most of the organization is to deal with change, handle complexity, as the current business environment changes so fast for the business user to cope. Thus, the value of information is not isolated, focusing on the information aspect of the role in the context of the business is part of the innovation. Companies that leverage information to explore potential or use technology to create key differentiation among the competition are usually much more successful than those who don't.

To run an innovative organization, information-based forecasting is crucial to bring both insight and foresight to the business. Not only does the daily transaction of business involve information, but the value of information is also to empower the business with real-time insight across the organization in ways never possible before, for making transformative change. The management needs to shift the “bits and bytes” talk to innovative conversation for inspiring, motivating, persuading, negotiating, or clarifying, encouraging knowledge-sharing, generating and implementing great ideas continually.

Slice and dice the portfolio in a variety of ways - by geography; by line of business; by sponsoring executive; by delivery unit; strategic theme; and so on: Without innovation, organizations cannot thrive for the long term. Managing a healthy innovation portfolio should be integrated with strategic and financial investment. Planning & processes. There are incremental or breakthrough innovations. Effective categorization helps to highlight the real value of an innovation portfolio. Some elements that may help to identify what factors could result in short-term revenue-generating business initiatives being set aside in favor of another considered more strategic, or vice versa.

Innovation portfolio management plays a significant role in portfolio prioritization and optimization. In order to make the portfolio executable, an organization needs to make sure that enough resources are available to deliver projects and programs, and also manage the interdependencies of the initiatives. Innovation has a very low success rate. Clarified categorization is also important to have enough visibility about how the projects/programs are performing in order to monitor progress in a structural way. Without effective categorization to clarify the goals for fitting your circumstances, perhaps, resources/assets/time would be misused and talent could be misplaced.

From “under-governance, over-governance” to nonlinear governance: Digital innovation has to connect the wider dots within the business ecosystem. Innovation has higher risk than any other types of business initiatives. The governance aspect and innovation don't immediately come together depending on the context in which innovation is used. Applying a single layer of governance, as a lot of businesses do, will either enforce over governance or under governance. Over-governance stifles innovation; under-governance makes innovation risky.

Innovation governance is neither linear nor single dimension. Innovation governance is less about control, more about enablement and intelligence. The value proposition of good governance and brand should be integrated within and across operations. High mature companies adopt social-technical-ecological perspective of governance models, to deal with uncertainty and complexity enable innovation management to understand business ecosystem dynamics, combining different ecological knowledge systems to aid in interpreting and responding to ecosystem feedback, in order to improve innovation effectiveness and efficiency. 

Innovation involves new ways of bringing together ideas and resources to create something novel and then transform those novel ideas to achieve business value. Innovation is doing something better than it currently is. Digital organizations should build innovation as a differentiated business competency, learn how to solve problems creatively and manage a balanced innovation portfolio systematically.

Posted in: Innovation