Innovation

The importance of innovation has increased as the business has the pressure to get more and better innovation.

Innovation becomes simply “creating value by solving simple or complex problems.” With “VUCA” digital new normal, the bulk of information, methodologies, and approaches involved, as the complexity of processes encountered speaks in favor of the scientific approach and engineering practices for innovation management. 

Innovation is both art and science. Theoretical treatment of the innovation discipline may give rise to a science -in a sense, innovation would be a "cross-science” discipline. The nature of how the implementation of the idea has to follow a logical path for the solution, provides a great opportunity for managing digital innovation effectively.

Innovation & cognition: The "mind" represents our consciousness and awareness. Cognition is the mental process of acquiring knowledge through thoughts, experiences, and senses. People are different, not because we look different, but because we think differently. The cognitive gap is one of the serious problems for both problem-solving and innovation as it causes the blind spots for either defining the real problem or solving it smoothly.

To overcome the common challenges and advance the human race, we have to really dig beneath the superficial layer, see around the corner and transcend the interdisciplinary knowledge, to get to the heart of the matter by bridging cognitive gaps and enforcing multidimensional thinking. Thus, it is important to build heterogeneous teams with the cognitive difference, complementary skills, capabilities, background, experience, to broaden the vision, and deepen understanding.

Innovation & brilliance: Innovation is about taking alternative ways to do things. Only a balanced mind can take the tough decision and make better choices. Without the inner balance of energies, one cannot achieve a perfect balance of emotions and logic to generate fresh ideas. Creative leadership does have a component of affiliative intelligence. It's the examples of positivity and brilliance that shine the brightest, rather than those that left people feeling disappointed and wretched, to build a creative working environment in which people can learn and grow, creativity is encouraged, and innovation can be managed successfully.

The convergence of work life and personal life requires professionals today to be consistent in thinking and acting, improving emotional brilliance. Emotions make people move and hence, channelizing them requires intelligence on the part of innovation leadership. Those brilliant leaders and professionals are kind, self-critical, empowering, unbelievably insightful to generate fresh ideas and spark creativity. Seeking profound business insight is no doubt the brilliant way to spur fresh insight, build a high-performance innovative organization.

Innovation & intangible: A business capability defines "What" a business does or can do by encapsulating all organization resources (tangible, intangible or human resources). There are both tangible and intangible components in innovation capability. Besides people, processes, or technologies, communication, leadership, culture, etc, are all intangible ingredients of innovation management. Many companies focus on the tangibles, but they lack an in-depth understanding of the intangible elements in innovation management, just getting them to consider the list of intangibles business elements would be a breakthrough.

In order to move up to the next level of innovation maturity, the culture needs to be changed as well to adapt to the emerging digital trends and pulling strategy execution towards the right decision. Because, the invisible culture is the decisive factor for the success or failure of innovation management. To be the innovator of tomorrow, improve communication effectiveness and innovation leadership maturity, people or businesses have to keep learning, updating their mindsets, knowledge, methodology, and approaches, creating alternative ways of working; mentors and coaching others relentlessly.

The importance of innovation has increased as the business has the pressure to get more and better innovation. Innovation is what leads to differentiation. There are many ways to differentiate and, therefore, there are many ways to pursue innovation. High-innovative organizations can fine-tune innovation management as a differentiated business competency and master innovation in a structural way to achieve high performance business results.

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Innovativeinsight

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking of new ideas; sharing and innovating.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with 8700+ blog postings in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. 

The “Digital Master” book series includes 28 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to businesses and society. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Here is the weekly insight of innovation leadership, IT Management, and Talent Management to celebrate 8700 blog postings.

Innovativesolutionists Problem-solving is both art and science. It is about seeing a problem and actually finding a premium solution to that problem, not just the Band-Aid approach to fixing the symptom. The problem-solving practices will not be simple for many of today’s complex issues. Some or many solve certain problems in a certain area but create other problems in the other domains.

Interdisciplinarycognition We live in a hybrid world with overcomplexity and interdependence, real world interaction and online presentation. Interdisciplinary thinking is a combined thinking process to solve many of today’s complex problems which require strategic consideration, multidimensional cognition, innovation approach, cross-cultural, cross-generational perspectives. Many of today’s problems are complex, which types of hybrid thinking are in demand to generate premium solutions for overcoming challenges.

Innerlogic In today’s digital world, logic is often nonlinear and multidimensional. If you want to discover the essential meaning of a term, you must be prepared to go beyond thinking that confines itself to just things. Abstraction logic enables agreement, adapts and improves the organization in the future by abstracting major concerns such as people satisfaction, partner relationship analysis, cost estimations as well as those key elements which can be applied to give a holistic picture of what is working or not in order to lubricate interdisciplinary communication, enhance cross-boundary collaboration and reach the "future statement" in a stepwise manner effortlessly.

Innerscorecards Scorecards translate your strategy into concrete terms and help you track its implementation. A well-defined scorecard helps the management take optimization actions, allows you to focus on the most critical issues, and puts all things in context.

Innercauseeffect Contemporary companies or societies are getting more and more complex, we need to gain an in-depth understanding of numerous visible and invisible factors that perhaps influence the cycle of balance and growth. We can shape a people-centric society based on the realization of sameness and difference; process and flexibility, standardization and personalization. To deal with unprecedented uncertainty and complexity, data based cause-effect analysis provides partial fact, but even critically, follows a more humanistic approach and accepts this unpredictable, irrational human factor as the key element for addressing challenges, accelerating performance and unlocking collective potential.

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking of new ideas; sharing and innovating. It’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Innerpeopletraining

People management is an important process that underpins the organization’s collective human capability to achieve high performance.

Information exponentiality and knowledge abundance are part of reality. There is so much in the world we do not know nor understand and because of that limitation, we need to choose to continue to think, learn, grow and empower people to learn and grow too. People are always the most invaluable business success factors. 

However, people management or human asset management has been made complicated by using means of traditional approaches, because there are silos thinking and rigid processes. A holistic people management discipline is an imperative to involve people development and potentiality management.

A continuum of practices for identifying, acquiring, developing, deploying, and retaining talented people throughout an organization effectively: One of the crucial goals for talent management is to involve talented people, inspire creativity and improve productivity by giving them active roles in the business initiatives to solve real world problems, build the future needed professional competencies today. It’s not easy to bring all talented people and mold them into an effective team. It’s important to develop, deploy, and engage talented people for unlocking performance.

There is a huge difference between a “performance evaluation” and a “developmental opportunity.” The trouble begins when talent managers confuse these two contexts, or worse yet, hide intentions of “evaluation” within the context of “development.” “Talent creating” is a strategic choice to build an alternative talent pipeline; and “Developing Talent” should be ongoing practices. It's time to re-imagine the digital workforce and workplace, create the right environment to grow a natural affinity into a "talent, “believe in "building talent" where it would otherwise be underutilized or dormant. In fact, performance management is not a silo management practice to monitor or measure the quantitative delivery of an employee, but a holistic discipline to strike the right balance of performance and potentiality and drive competitive advantage of the business.

Developing people via proactively questioning, guiding, advising and motivating: Employee development plan should be done with employees and not against them. It should also be clear how the company will invest in developing their human capital since the organization will benefit significantly. Human capital management should ponder deeper, knowing about employees’ mindset, attitudes, behaviors that need improving. Is there an environment of psychological safety and culture of innovation for their majority of employees? Do we have a working environment in which employees are willing to give discretionary effort, and are always looking for ways to improve individual and team performance? Are we doing the best to encourage talent growth, create synergy by putting the right talent in the right position, invite employees to brainstorm and contribute to innovation?

People Management is an important process that underpins the organization’s collective human capability to achieve high performance. To make a talent development plan, the first need would be to identify the Gaps: Where exactly the individual is lacking? What are the skills or attributes that need to be developed? Does an individual's capability align well with a business's strategic need? Training and development plans for the individual, therefore, need to be in line with what the business or organization needs for the future. If it is based on need, it has a greater chance of a successful outcome.

Calculate return on investment and identify talent based on competence and capability objectively: People have different strengths, they think differently, learn differently, have different interests, motivation, and goals. Any talent management initiative can be measured with ROI to reflect the key set of business value. The key point is to customize training to the needs of the organization. The values ROI delivers in talent management must be a subset of the organizations' own measure of created business value.

Without measurement, you have no idea if people are improving. You should have both metrics and an understanding of human nature and needs. Identify areas of improvement. What is important is setting agreed upon goals and objectives of talent development, establishing key indicators, and then working with the employee so there is a common understanding of goals and agreement on how to measure them. That's all about bringing your cumulative best talents and efforts to bear on business challenges and to achieve performance maximization.

People management is an important process that underpins the organization’s collective human capability to achieve high performance. It’s important to provide training on the specific aspect that will help the company and employees to align the corporate strategy with employees' career goals. It's also important to make an objective assessment of communication effectiveness, employee engagement, collaboration coherence, innovativeness, and productivity to ensure the organization is in great shape for maximizing collective human potential.

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InnovativeBoD

The ever-changing business dynamic brings significant opportunities and responsibilities for the digital BoDs to drive changes by envisioning the future of organization.

Due to the “VUCA” characteristics -complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity, and velocity of the digital era, the directorship in any organization becomes more critical and challenging to steer the business in the right direction and drive change effectively.

 An ultra-modern board can set a clear choice among future scenarios that advocate advancement in mindset, attitude, or behavior.

The Board of Directors as the top leadership team can make a great influence on shaping a digital mindset and advocating changes: Change is inevitable, with increasing pace of changes. For the large scale of business change, BoDs understand what's required and how as a high-level basis of going digital means to the business, so they can make a significant impact on accelerating digital transformation with premium speed. They set policies and provide principles governing the company's commercial activities. They take the praise or the blame depending largely on their ability to influence the business outcomes.

Leadership is an influence. To "influence" means to be able to shape other people's views or opinions towards one's own views or perspectives. With influential intelligence, the contemporary corporate board can inspire, innovate, improve, interact, interpret, exemplify, encourage, and orchestrate change, empowering people to achieve more, etc. Corporate boards make strategic decisions and enhance governance practices, they apply independent thinking, positive attitudes to make sound judgment, decide cohesively, enhance governance discipline, shape collective digital mindsets and advocate changes consistently.

Enable clear linking of strategy from the boardroom to the shop floor: As senior advisor of the business management, the corporate board directors need to focus on emerging trends, technologies, and uncertainties, looking into an unknown future and attempting to define the landscape with its risks and opportunities. The corporate board’s strategic oversight includes co-setting business principles and planning to adapt to the dynamic business environment by identifying management bottlenecks, de-bureaucratizing processes; scrutinizing business prioritization and processes to improve asset/resource management; catalyzes innovation by identifying innovators, leveraging information technology, de-risking innovation management; monitors business performance and develops the best and next practices to influence business outcomes.

The strategic direction of the company must allow for economic, market or customer change and let business adapt smoothly, tapping a true source of advantage. The BoD’s oversight helps organizations define and deliver organizational capabilities aligned with their strategic goals and objectives, prepares the strategic planning to point the company in a direction in which it can maximize its market position and reap as many benefits as possible, set the priority to stay focused, identifies promising big ideas for investment that will accelerate bold change, continues to prioritize and adjust the strategy, to leverage growth potential, establish clear proofs-of-concept before making the investment to launch and scale.

Corporate boards protect business reputation and nurture business brands: The organizations across the globe face more pressure and ambiguity these days, as media continue to report reputational “surprises” from some prestigious companies, and more organizations work hard to sustain their brand and reputation. Reputation is part of the business brand, and the business brand usually also reflects the enterprise culture. The corporate boards clarify what the brand reflects, the value, business purpose, how the customers think of the brand, and how to build a strong corporate brand and improve organizational maturity.

Reputation management can be classified into culture/brand management, knowledge management, crisis and risk management. Corporate boards enhance governance disciplines, protect business reputation, and nurture business brands. The organization's brand equity is the key asset of concern when it comes to the question of reputational risk, and like any asset, it is the responsibility of the board to protect it.

The ever-changing business dynamic brings significant opportunities and responsibilities for the digital BoDs to drive changes by envisioning the future of organization; make global influence by persuasion, collaboration; innovate the business by connecting reasonable dots and knowledge transfer; improve leadership effectiveness and maturity.

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Innovation

Innovation is an exceptional, exclusive, and realistic idea that separates you from others without a second thought.

Change is accelerating all around us, innovation is the only way to succeed, as a company or as an individual. The very characteristics of digital organization are openness, responsiveness, innovativeness, fluidity, or great design, etc,

 Innovation is all about doing things better, differentiating yourself from competitions, innovating an organization requires an in-depth understanding of broad vision of business transformation, underlying business elements, invisible business culture and interdisciplinary talented leaders and professionals.

Innovation & association: We get innumerable thoughts every moment, they pass consciously or unconsciously, and sometimes, those thoughts trigger other thoughts to create new ideas or fresh insights. Such intellectual association seems to be more perceptually based, related to the "aha" phenomenon, and spark creativity surprisingly.

Being innovative is a state of mind, association, inquisitiveness, networking, experimenting, etc, are all critical processes to spur innovation. The intensity of one’s association and engagement via involvement and commitment in an organization depends on his or her perception of the purpose of that organization. Not only do people need to lead the great teams for transforming novel ideas to achieve commercial values; but more crucially, they are able to “walk the talk,” develop innovation principles in association with practices in a field of entrepreneurship activities and forming its content as an intellectual innovation management discipline.

Innovation & Loose coupling: The hyper-connectivity nature of digitalization breaks down the functional, geographical, or even organizational border, organizations across the vertical sectors are stepping into the uncharted water and blurred territories, becoming more dynamic and keep evolving. Business capability development cycle needs to be significantly shortened to adapt to the “VUCA” reality. Loose coupling makes it possible to change the components without affecting the system, as long as the interface is kept stable, and builds dynamic innovation capability.

Digitalization is about flow: information flow, idea flow, and business flow. It requires a much greater dose of informal organizational elements such as shared corporate values and culture, common business language, multidimensional knowledge and skills. Organizations or modern societies can loosely build innovation hubs, and manage its portfolio of relevant cross-border strategic business competency, with loosely coupled components, organizational interdependence with “loose control” rules, the appropriate mix of enabling organizational elements, engaging digital talent with free thinking, balancing standardization and creativity

Innovation & leverage: Information is the most intensive puzzle piece of the innovation. No question information and technology are the competitive advantages or your untapped leverage. The well-defined innovation framework and fine-tuned structure are essential to managing innovation in a corporation. The leverage point is how to structure innovation to stay focused, without adding too much complexity. Highly innovative organizations have deployed a range of different management methodologies and technologies and tailored their own circumstances for developing the fitting innovation models.

In practice, leaders and managers should find the leverage points, guide, direct, own the strategy they hold themselves accountable for, listen, communicate, and rally the team, leverage design thinking and creativity, ask open-ended questions, methodologically review a list of levers from business model components, develop a list of potential business model options, and implement the best ones smoothly.

Innovation is an exceptional, exclusive, and realistic idea that separates you from others without a second thought. Digital innovation has a broader spectrum, hybrid nature, and deep context. You have to systematically develop the business competency to execute it successfully, and that is something you do not accomplish overnight. It’s a cross-boundary collaboration and needs strategic alliance to amplify its impact.

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Initiatiateanalysis

The convergence of machine learning, artificial intelligence, analytics and business intelligence, statistics & decision science will make a direct impact on building an intelligent business.

Business Analytics is the logical process of examining data and applying management science to support decision-making in an enterprise. There are three parts to the analytics ecosystem: technological -getting and storing the data); quantitative/interpretive; and decision support-decision making. 

With the information-based analysis, and application of intelligence, it is the aggregation and assessment of information that creates the intelligence required to define the rules and strategies driving the business forward effectively.

Analysis: Big Data can be considered to be a set of technologies that are used to develop a data focused infrastructure targeted at solving business problems: Methodologically, business intelligence is the process of transforming data into information and transforming that information into knowledge/insight/foresight in better management and governance. Truly modern analytics would be able to see through the hallucination of the entheogens in order to make logical deductions. Businesses need insights that drive real value, data science is only one of many enablers, and decision science could put more focus on decision analysis.

For problem-solving, improvement and innovation. working on the organizational aspects of creating incentives, re-engineering processes, and leveraging collaboration tools to make information flow relevant to specific groups and individuals, and running a digital organization as a “living organic system,” not just the sum of mechanical pieces. Information based analysis helps to develop new strategic insights (not just reports) based on new and consistently changing and streaming data, very dynamic, predictive and prescriptive in nature, mainly used for text/sentiment analytic, machine learning and adaptive modeling.

Data analysis involves quantitative reasoning and interpretive power to capture business insight: Data cleansing, transformation and sorting are vital in the data world, it helps to put things in perspective for business to read between the lines with accuracy and clarity of information that is needed for making effective decisions with consistency. "Data" is scattered, and needs cleansing and improvement. Data cleaning and data management has a deep business purpose to turn data into information, refine information into business insight.

Technically, cleansing the data is often the most difficult and time-consuming part of data science. Understand your data needs, remove redundancy, and collect your data more responsibly. It requires referential integrity, to ensure information synchronization. Data cleansing has always been a challenge. Data analysis involves quantitative reasoning and interpretive power to capture business insight. So it’s important to know your business, know your data. It is best to solve the problem as early on as possible at the source that would be more ideal, keep fine-tuning business processes and improving organizational effectiveness and efficiency.

Information analytics is the systematic and methodological selection of data to track the behavior of past decisions to support future business directions: How you frame a decision largely determines the kinds of alternatives that will emerge from the choice process of decision analysis. The key is to orient the analysis and decision variables tied to forecasted outcomes with uncertainty. The whole purpose of decision analytics is to make better decisions based on data big and small. The typical challenge seen with the traditional decision-making analytics approach is to arrive at insights. The better decision engineering approach is to embed analytics in decision making systems. Leverage good information, processes, and other decision tools as a "corporate knowledge base" to help make better decisions and solve problems effectively.

High intelligent organizations have a clear understanding of how customer-centric approaches enhance the business model and extend profitability. Business Intelligence as a data process, offers slice-and-dice, drill-down, and trend analysis capabilities. Everything from how pricing is affecting close times and support calls to referral business activity triggered by high customer satisfaction, etc. Business leaders/managers are provided scoreboard/dashboards or some other tools that are drillable and specific for tracking the progress of business management and calculate relevant return on investment, etc. 

 There is a world of difference between the best tools and the worst, and this is where the focus should be in terms of quality, not just on how good is the source data, but how good is the processing and merging; how good the data analysis team with complementary skills and expertise. The convergence of machine learning, artificial intelligence, analytics and business intelligence, statistics & decision science will make a direct impact on building an intelligent business.

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Identifyinvestment

It’s important for the management to identify and evaluate investments in a way that solves problems with priority, and achieve strategic goals continually.

Businesses need to make investments and improve return on investment by articulating what the pros and cons of each investment option are for today and the proposed tomorrow. 

Put the framework in place to map the strategic objectives into key performance indicators, and then, determine what investments will accelerate the changes you want to see in your key performance indicators, and how to make continuous improvement.

Investment transparency: Venture investment is a complex business activity. The investment management needs to ensure that they are investing in the right business initiatives to improve business growth. Setup idea forums to engage the business and build business liaisons proactively to help shape the problem or opportunity. Analyze total cost, total value, and total impact. The logical investment scenario helps an organization assess whether the business improvement is the right investment to be done in the first place, and ensure the expected return on investment.

From an investment perspective, there is a concept of the “golden thread” that can link the business strategy to investment goals or business benefit. It’s about spending the money right, and getting the right results. You should not spend to meet a quota, nor should you avoid spending to stay within a quota. You should spend to make a return.

Investment portfolio: The potential portfolio investment needs to streamline the strategic objective alignment and accelerate future growth of the business. Make sure the # and financial investment of the initiatives are aligned with at least one strategic objective over the total portfolio, provide visibility of the projects that are supporting the company's strategic objectives and assess opportunities to realign resources and investments as appropriate. Besides financial results, it’s also important to evaluate the overall business value of a portfolio from investment perspectives, such as quality, performance, customer satisfaction, and the varying matters that stakeholders consider important to them.

To survive and thrive for the long-term perspective, investment management should involve more planning, more compromise on budget expenditures, and changing outlooks on profit margins as a result. They must invest in and leverage appropriate technologies and solutions to generate valuable insights to help businesses open up new channels of revenue and monetization within the enterprise, the industry, and their ecosystem. In order to maximize ROI, businesses have to build a balanced portfolio, to consume resources efficiently; calculate financial & performance indicators wisely.

Return on investment: Return on Investment tells the business management how well organizational investment repays the company. Each portfolio has goals and metrics unique to that portfolio. Businesses need to make investments and improve return on investment by articulating what the pros and cons of each investment option are for today and the proposed tomorrow. S.M.A.R.T (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely) goals play an important role in assessing the effectiveness of problem-solving as well as quality of problem-solving, effectiveness & efficiency, substantiate return on investment, and get increasingly more attention with organizations that have poor visibility and control over their project portfolio. Enhance the overall economic value of the portfolio in order to get the optimal return on investment.

Even if you have a well-defined set of measurements, it doesn't guarantee you could measure them right. Too-optimistic cost projections perhaps seed doubts about an initiative in others’ minds. It is insufficient to simply communicate an initiative’s promised benefits, because these benefits must be delivered, bringing together people who would not typically have the opportunity to communicate in the day-to-day operations. S.M.A.R.T goals work better as a post evaluation tool. Goals are the key, but what makes them effective is how they are implemented.

Building a solid portfolio management to enable strategy execution is difficult, the value-based investment management needs to be driven by concepts like collaborative value or collective advantage, evaluating individual and aggregate investments. It’s important for the management to identify and evaluate investments in a way that solves problems with priority, and achieve strategic goals continually.

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Initiatecommunication

Communication effectiveness sets culture tones, overcome mediocrity and drives long term business competency.

Communication is both art and science. Highly effective communication is the lubricate to solve problems. Superior communication not just articulates what happens today, but conveys the vision of “to be.” 

Poor communication styles prevent the objectives and supporting goals from being “known.” Communications are the tool to solve problems, it is one of the most crucial soft factors for deciding business success.

 

Communication lubricates business relationships, organizational transparency will enable effective communication: A well-defined communication protocol expands the ability of management at every level of the organization to follow common communication principles, build trust, enforce collaboration, make timely and accurate decisions, and motivate employees to grow and expand their roles within the organization. When communication is based on stereotypes, or command & control, it often leads to a vicious cycle. There are a variety of communication styles, from information-based conversations to touchy-feely talks for connecting the minds and touching the hearts can lead communication to a virtuous cycle.

Creating and nurturing trust based on effective communication is one of those precious things to deal with conflicts: It constructively advocates the fresh point of view, to solve thorny problems and advance human society. Communication effectiveness doesn’t mean to be compliant only, or being too “direct,” too straight, or even too “rude,” From abstraction to elaboration, a key consideration is to tailor your audience, deliver messages with empathy, improve communication effectiveness and maturity. Organizational transparency enables the staff to become more open-minded, optimize processes, and improve communication effectiveness.

The creation of interactive multi-channel communication and sharing processes to generate awareness for deepening understanding: Miscommunication is caused by perception gaps because people have cognitive differences, a different knowledge base and cognitive understanding to articulate things. Even if two people observe the same thing or participate in the same conversation, they could perceive the situation and convey the message differently. The emerging digital platforms and technologies can be used to facilitate better communication with business leaders and professionals, enabling fact based communication to tailor different audiences, for either making effective decisions or solving problems thoroughly.

The ultimate goal of running a fluid digital organization is to get mass collaboration and create business synergy through less hierarchy, cross-functional communication. Communication effectiveness sets culture tones, overcome mediocrity and drives long term business competency.

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Innovation

High-innovative organizations can fine-tune innovation management as a differentiated business capability and master innovation in a structural way.

The global world becomes flattened as people all over the globe can share knowledge, cr-create fresh ideas and co-solve problems collaboratively. Because we each have different cognitive styles, perception, personality, knowledge or life experiences. 

Innovation, either as an individual process or a collective process, helps us grow, and transform. It takes cognitive practices to think transparently, interdisciplinarily, and collaboratively, build up a creative environment for solving problems innovatively

Innovation & Interface: Innovation happens at the intersection of people and processes. The user interface remains transparent to the changes in the process layer. It's important to give the user the ability to interact with the process wherever they are. Create intuitive interfaces between the application and the user to allow the user to take advantage of the application feature, delight customers with personalized solutions, put effort into integrating processes with multiple smart devices, and make technical capacities more powerful but less expensive.

Insightful leaders and professionals need to be fluent in multidimensional thought processes, play a cognitive interface role in sharing contextual understanding of handy issues or circumstances at the moment in order to bridge cognitive gaps, build a competitive team with complementary mindsets or skills, play varieties of personas in idea generations, prioritization and implementation.

Innovation & Humanity: Humans are intelligent beings, if we really are as intelligent as we claim to be, we should have principles and disciplines to discern the positive motivation behind actions and behaviors or the curiosity behind creativity. If we viewed society as an opportunity to problem-solving, the biggest needs of any society then are where the power lies and the shields come down. People should develop self-awareness to bring in innovative thinking that can take our humanity to its glory and prove the positive aspect of "Survival of the Fittest."

Whether we like it or not, as long as humans are unique, their mindsets, opinions, cultures, lives, and views etc, are equally unique and diversified. Take a new mindset for humanity as the current earthly belief systems well indoctrinated are contrary to this view. Design, empathy, and humanity are interconnected, make people feel involved in the design and implementation scenario, show customers that you put a great amount of effort into delivering intuitive products, services, or solutions which closely meet their needs.

Innovation & Inherence: Creativity is about thinking beyond conventional wisdom, or the “Out of Box” thinking which results in an action that tests a possible solution. As the ability to think and produce, creativity requires a certain degree of independence and mental balance Based on the talents and skills one has been given, are people able to live an authentic life, spur creativity, and make the biggest contribution to society according to their specific gifts and passions? It’s important to explore our minds and bodies for the latent powers inherent in our genes, keep experimenting or exploring the “art of possibility.”

Enterprises are inherently and intensely complex, diverse, and ambiguous with unpredictable outcomes. A problem has an inherent and irreducible complexity, there are unknown interactions and very high inner dynamics in it. Value is inherent and tricky though because it's subjective in the eye of the beholder. The shareholders who highly value innovation would value organizations with bigger innovation appetite and devote more resources towards future breakthrough

There is no template which we can apply and suddenly become creative. The importance of innovation has increased as the business has the pressure to get more and better innovation. High-innovative organizations can fine-tune innovation management as a differentiated business capability and master innovation in a structural way.

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Itperformance

As the saying goes, “You can only manage what you measure.”

Corporate Performance Management is a management control from strategy to the shop floor. "If you can't measure, you can't manage," legendary management guru Peter Drucker once asserted. 

Managing performance means understanding results, setting metrics, fixing plans, and making decisions to ensure it happens. 

It takes multifaceted approaches from multidimensional perspectives to unlock digital performance and catalyze change.

  

                IT Performance 

Innovateitviasettingparameterright Due to the varying nature of organizations and business dynamic, there is no one size fitting all magic formula on how to run a high-mature IT organization. It’s important to collect obtained data, analyze information, evaluate measurement results, determine what needs to be improved, assign the right people with the right capabilities to take actions for performing IT-enabled business improvement, and make proper adjustments in the strategic management to achieve high performance results. Here is a set of IT management parameters to improve overall organizational effectiveness and speed..

Itasvaluecreator As businesses move into the digital future, technology is the fastest growing arena, information is the lifeblood of the business, and IT becomes the backbone of running a high performance organization. The idea that the IT organization is overlooked as a digital driver and is being bypassed by business units comes at an odd time when you consider the robust new technology prospects and pervasive information influence.

IT Performance With constant changes and frequent disruptions, highly effective IT leaders have to be prepared to constantly realign technology against the enterprise's business needs and measure things really matter to the organizational success. The art and science of IT management are to optimize its usage, achieve business value, and develop long term business competency. Measuring modern IT performance is no longer a single management discipline to measure efficiency anymore, it takes a cross-disciplinary approaches to measure IT effectiveness, profitability, transformability, and innovation. Here are three aspects of IT performance measurement.

Itprofitability In face of fierce competition and tough business dynamics, achieving profitability is a strategic aspect of business’s survival and thriving, especially for many struggling vertical sectors today. Information technology is in a unique position to observe broadly and explore deeply about their business and the related digital ecosystem.

Incentives Related to IT Performance Today IT is permeating into every corner of the organization, and all forward-thinking organizations across industrial sectors declare they are in the information management business. However, some IT organizations get stuck at a low level of maturity, running as a silo function - bottom-up, with the controller’s mindset.

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thoughts; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with about #8600 blog postings. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.



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The "Performance Master" Book Chapter 5 Introduction


The "Performance Master" Book Conclusion


The "Performance Master" Quote Collection I


The "Performance Master" Quote Collection II


The "Performance Master" Quote Collection III

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Innerlogic

Abstraction helps to eliminate the unnecessary hassles so that the necessary can speak out; abstraction logic bridges the differences, captures insight, and pursues wisdom.

In today’s digital world, logic is often nonlinear and multidimensional. If you want to discover the essential meaning of a term, you must be prepared to go beyond thinking that confines itself to just things. 

Abstraction logic enables agreement, adapts and improves the organization in the future by abstracting major concerns such as people satisfaction, partner relationship analysis, cost estimations as well as those key elements which can be applied to give a holistic picture of what is working or not in order to lubricate interdisciplinary communication, enhance cross-boundary collaboration and reach the "future statement" in a stepwise manner effortlessly.

Navigation logic: Change Management has a very wide scope, requires a clear vision, a logical framework for navigating and making effective communication and driving progress in a structural way. The comprehensive abstract enables business leaders to clarify change navigation logic by understanding when to look further; when to look closer; when to step in and when to stay out, and chart the route for all from their own respective positions towards the business destination.

Change Management always fails when management thinks that they get all the answers, and they come up with a plan in a vacuum and try to sell it. The contextual navigation helps business leaders and professionals not only to generate fresh ideas or fix problems, but also enables them to scale up and amplify effect. The change management has to be dynamic so that it can deal with changed conditions and unforeseen circumstances by clarifying navigating logic: “why” you need change, “where” you should improve, as well as how to amplify change impact.

Pattern logic: Abstraction is being able to step back from details, see patterns, look into a bigger picture to build and spread the truth. The patterns are grouped and sometimes pathed within an area of expertise, pattern logic enables us to capture deep insight into complex problems systematically in order to solve them in a structural way. Patterns are good in practice and definitely intellectually stimulating. So ties the patterns together so you can navigate among them to capture unique insight for great design and effective problem-solving.

Each pattern is useful to address some specific problem. What could be a stronger relationship to us than something that solves a problem for us? Learn what makes a good pattern good so you can derive your own solutions in each new situation. Learn a growing set of patterns so you can select one if it is useful. Sometimes tie the patterns together so you can navigate among them to figure out better solutions to complex problems in unsurprisingly wise ways.

Inductive - deductive logic: For strategic change or large-scale business transformation, it’s important to apply an architectural framework to perceive the business with both a broader scope of abstraction and an in-depth understanding of its interconnectivity and interdependence, enhance a holistic management discipline which can break through the industrial constraints and limitations in pursuit of possibilities.

So many people do not know how to connect the dots within complex systems, nor think abstractedly, holistically, nor comprehend dynamics, inductions or deductions, nor understand variables, interfaces, and interaction. To simplify and optimize business processes and make smooth business transformation, abstraction and agreement is the way forward. You can adjust the level of abstraction by applying inductive logic through deductive logic, deep-analyzing problems, talk at a conceptual level about what the business can or wants to be able to do, enforce strategic level communication and abstract insight to reach agreement.

Digital transformation is the journey for solving problems caused by "conflict," "out of balance," or “lack of logic.” Abstraction helps to eliminate the unnecessary hassles so that the necessary can speak out; abstraction logic bridges the differences, captures insight, and pursues wisdom.

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Innovativeglobe

Providing personalized services or solutions to its customers has become the new normal to run a people-centric organization. 

The effects of an increasingly digitized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. Digital is the age of creativity and innovation, creativity is the most desired trait for digital leaders and professionals today, and innovation is the light every organization is pursuing. 

Which themes shall you set to advocate digital transformation? How to lead toward the digital future effortlessly?

    Innovative Globe

Innovativesociety Modern society is a dynamic continuum with collective human progress. Real societal advancement is made through the work of forwarding-looking minds, renewing creative energy, updating knowledge, exploring growth opportunities, and driving progressive changes. Change is the “now,” transformation is a journey and needs a larger strategic investment. It requires step-function changes in tools, culture, leadership, process, or the overall integral management competency.

Innovativeperspectives We are experiencing major societal transformation from the industrial machine age to knowledge and creative economy. The digital paradigm is an emerging ecosystem of principles, policies, and practices, with many dimensions. The digital perspective defines the business level view of the organizational ecosystem. To drive change and make deep influence, the business leaders are pondering: Which perspectives should we consider? What makes perspectives/models what they are? What perspectives are we taking that might blind us to see the other side of the coin?

Innovativesociety Nowadays, information is exponential and knowledge is only a click away. Most human societies are moving from agricultural or industrial societies into information/knowledge societies, and very few are on the way to shape a creative economy. The radical change from one era to another is often called paradigm shift.

Innovativegloblist Nowadays, we live in a hyper-connected and interdependent global society. The geographical, functional, and industrial boundaries are blurred. Being global is about crossing not only borders but also cultural divides between business, government, and social sectors. It is important to gain objective perceptions of varying global events, circumstances, set a strong global leadership theme to unify and harmonize based on a set of agreeable principles, and integrate global quintessential via interdisciplinary lenses. In short, visionary globalists with versatile leadership personas are in strong demand to bridge differences, solve problems at the global scope and co-imagine, co-develop a contemporary global society collaboratively.

Innovativeglobe Organizations and the world as a complex adaptive system requires an understanding of how the things have come together, being 'developed,” as well as how to keep refining and innovating. Our society and global world is forced to "grow out" of a paradigm because of changes in the physical world or other major shifts in daily reality. A new paradigm arises out of new knowledge, such as the age of enlightenment and customer-centricity.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #8700th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 28 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to businesses and society. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Innovation

Innovation is about thinking differently, acting differently, delivering differently, or adding value differently.

Innovation happens anywhere in an open environment, with ecosystem involvement. The progress of the world is pushed forward by a select few who are applying vision, expertise, and techniques, using broad and diverse skills to create “the art of possible.” 

Innovation management is not a thing or even a state, but a management process of lining up the culture of change in pursuit of alternative ways to do things or experimenting in a new approach to solve problems.

Innovation & comprehensiveness: Innovation has a very low success rate due to un-conventionalism and high risk. Many business innovation efforts are symptomatic of not having a comprehensive understanding and taking stepwise approaches. Once you have a comprehensive vision of the system, its characteristics and dynamics, refine data into comprehensive information and knowledge abundance, organizations become more informative for capturing emerging business opportunities to innovate, prevent risks, and deal with innovation intensity in a structural way.

For many business leaders and professionals, there is no surprise that they will see the mixed picture of “old and new” in the organization, from the mindset, business model, process or practice perspectives, make decisions based on opening up with diverse viewpoint, careful and comprehensive analysis and synthesis, get input from a broad range of personalities and cognitive difference of people, keep things on track to ensure that processes, expenditure of time, money, energy and assignments of resources should be used wisely.

Innovation & circumstances: In an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world, the problems become over-complex and interconnected. Innovation often has a lot to do with external circumstances, but people tend to focus on internal circumstances. Thinking creatively about a problem requires being close to the problem, understanding context and intangible variables, seeing things from different angles to gain different perspectives, connecting dots to shape fresh views or new concepts, and catalyzing innovation smoothly.

Problem-solving is circumstantial. Sometimes, circumstances have already changed a long time ago. For either solving existing or emerging problems, always be careful about examining the potential points of engagement, rather than jumping to the “we'll fix this" mentality. Always challenge your own thinking or conventional wisdom by asking questions which often lead to discovering situations others do not see at first, create multiple pathways to figure out alternative solutions. Unlike restricted rules, conventional wisdom fitting in certain time frames or circumstances, innovation management needs to strike the right balance of theories and practices; creativity and processes, knowledge and imagination.

Innovation & reference: Innovation is the process that can be managed. If we no longer reference the past, then we are likely to repeat the mistakes of the past. Theories and lessons learned are important to improve innovation effectiveness. The theory is designed in actual contexts; practice is governed by theory. All practice is rooted in the theory of some kind, continue to examine the lessons learned from innovation initiatives, and consider whether what we learned has been refined into contextual intelligence for leading innovation.

Innovation requires you to discover innate talent according to your specific gifts and passions, live an authentic life, inspire others and get inspired by bigger pictures to solve problems and achieve more. The best way to go on discovering what we are capable of doing is by following our insights, intuitions, and imagination while at the same time, keeping our feet firmly on the ground. It's critical to perceive invisible behind the scenes, alter or change the frame of reference to create previously unconsidered solutions.

Innovation is about thinking differently, acting differently, delivering differently, or adding value differently. Innovations in the digital era are coming at a seemingly much faster pace, with changes and potential disruptions. There are many ways to innovate, the art of discovery is about rising above the status quo and taking on a new set of activities to create previously unconsidered solutions and unlocking collective potential.

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Understanding

It is the responsibility of each individual to examine themselves and to make sure they are open to true understanding.

It becomes complex if things do interact, particularly in the case of "nonlinear" interaction, you can't separate things properly or you cannot predict the actual effect of interaction straightforwardly. 

Companies that are skilled at managing complexity can gain advantages by pushing the boundaries of a more sophisticated business mix that provides opportunities to create inter-business value, differentiated digital capabilities and the unique set of business competency.

  Understanding

Understanding Understanding has happened to humans, which is a reflection of the intellect that has evolved. Our mind is a complex system of complex systems and many of them are very difficult to understand and grasp. We shape our thinking and the way we perceive and know things. The most important capability of the cognitive mind is the willingness and ability to seek out knowledge, gain an in-depth understanding, address our ignorance and assumptions we make to minimize it.

Innovativelevelsofadvancement Nowadays, organizations and human societies are inextricably connected with information technology. The geographical territories, knowledge boundaries, industry borders, or functional barriers are starting to weaken, allowing business leaders and professionals to pursue their aspirations, develop a fitting mindset, build their unique competency, as well as apply their expertise to the greatest effect.

Unconventional Understanding The digital dynamic is where the continuous disruptions often led by emerging technologies threaten to tear down silo mentality, outdated concepts, legacy systems and practices just as it generates new opportunities. Nowadays business leaders and professionals feel more comfortable with the digital new normal - chaos, uncertainty, and ambiguity. They should break down conventional thinking boxes, improve sound judgment and discernment skills. Practicing unconventional thinking takes a certain mental, psychological and conditional chemistry to break away from thoughts that others have thought about and deepen their understanding of either existing or emerging issues. It takes courage, but it is a necessary step to take initiatives to spark creativity and make true progress either individually or collectively.

Illustration, Inference, Interdisciplinarity We live in the world with a mixed bag of physical and virtual, new and old, truth and false, opportunities and risks, etc. Either running a business or taking a life journey is fundamentally an iterative problem-solving continuum. Problem-solving is about seeing a problem and actually finding a solution, not just the band-aid approach to fixing the symptom.

Improve Organizational Manageability via Deepening Systems Understanding Digital organizations are the hyper-connected and interdependent complex dynamics of the ecosystem within which the business is competing and with which the business is unavoidably entangled. They could be disrupted by emerging trends or disturbed by nonlinear events.

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thoughts; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making an influence through touching the hearts and connecting minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with about #8700 blog postings. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Innerscorecards

 If you can't quantify, you can’t have an objective argument.

Scorecards translate your strategy into concrete terms and help you track its implementation. A well-defined scorecard helps the management take optimization actions, allows you to focus on the most critical issues, and puts all things in context.

Scorecards translate strategy into concrete terms and help you track its implementation: A well designed balanced scorecard enables the management to accurately judge the coming curves and obstacles on the path of strategy management and get into actions in a creative way so that there is a coherent truth in the company connected to the strategy. 

Scorecards help to measure things that really matter, connect KPIs on the strategic level to the operational KPIs, provide a “balanced” view of tradeoff variables, ensure that these measures are quantitative, and implement whatever mechanisms you need to be able to gather the information and measure them in an objective way.

Scorecards make the meaning of success tangible for the organizations: The scorecard measures periodic results (weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually) against a predetermined goal, allowing users to gauge how their performance stacks up against expectations. Through a well-designed executive scoreboard, business leaders can capture both quantitative hard numbers about cost savings and qualitative perspective of management health.

One of the strengths in the scorecard is that they enable practical use of the success factors and performance management concepts, improve and evolve for sharing best practices within the team or across the management. A balanced scorecard is very useful for facilitating discussions and ensuring decision makers understand the various trade-offs and make the overall strategic balance, business dependencies, and constraints between components, individuals, and overall risk exposure.

Scorecards provide a “balanced” view of tradeoff variables: A scoreboard is a great way of selecting, scoping, and aligning specific initiative to overall strategic objectives and the budget. Create a simple descriptive balanced scorecard by instrumenting the indicators to show what is a common theme across all the initiatives that make profits through either saving on investments or increasing revenue.

The balanced scorecard with well-selected metrics can harness information-based communication and lead to continuous improvement. Set up the process of instrumenting the performance indicators to see how the progress is measured and what improvement really means. A scorecard assesses the progress of the set goals and provides the business management a wider perspective on its strategy by considering the impact on finances, customers, internal processes and employee satisfaction.

If you can't quantify, you can’t have an objective argument. The scorecard allows you to focus on the most important things and tailor the needs of varying business stakeholders. A well designed balanced scorecard helps to measure things that really matter, ensure that these measures are quantitative, and implement whatever mechanisms you need to be able to gather the information and measure them in an objective way.

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Innatepotential

It is a waste of resources to leave any valuable potential left unrecognized, untapped and unused.

Potentiality includes the overall ability to perform in the future by shaping an advanced mindset, discovering innate strength, and building core competency. The potential is an investment, improving revenue and catalyzing growth.

Learning, change, innovation, and improvement will come from all of the workforces. All ambitious businesses should make an objective assessment of their organizational strength and personality, and strive to unlock their full digital potential.

Change potential: Change is the new normal, with increasing pace, without change, organizations will stagnate. High mature digital organizations are people centric. Change comes from within the hearts and minds of the people. Traditional Change Management is often process-driven, but digital change management has to be people-centric. The organizational change potential directly impacts organizational growth cycle and business competency, driving and responding to change; seeing opportunity in uncertainty.

With “VUCA” reality, organizations adapt to dynamic circumstances, focus on performing well in new and changing contexts. From the business management perspective, shaping the future of the business is all about framing a structure that drives needed changes, continually delivers what the business needs and takes further steps to maximize business potential and unlocking performance. Change management is not a few spontaneous efforts. It’s a construct that involves the ability to recognize and diagnose the plethora of contextual variables inherent in the changing circumstances, then intentionally and intuitively adjust mindsets and behaviors in order to exert influence in that context.

Innovation potential: Innovation is unique business competency. Innovation often has a lot to do with external circumstances, often people tend to focus on internal circumstances. Innovation is to pursue alternative ways to do things. To unlock innovation potential requires thinking outside the box, altering or changing the frame of reference to create previously unconsidered solutions. Thus, individuals should always challenge their own thinking or conventional wisdom by asking questions which often lead to discovering situations others do not see at first and create multiple pathways to figure out alternatives.

In the organizational setting, it’s important to identify innovation capacity bottlenecks, such as resource limitation, process ineffectiveness, skills deficiency, or culture inertia, etc. To unlock innovation potential of the corporation, develop a good understanding of “as-is” so that you can let the ideas come forward regarding the future state. Bridging innovation execution gap to achieving the business objectives requires a logical execution scenario with well-set decision-making parameters, adaptive, iterative experiential processes, and performance thresholds, etc, as part of the wider holistic system for innovation.

Systems potential: Consider unpredictability, uncertainty and the probability of surprising emergent properties increase with the complexity of the systems. A goal-seeking organizational system becomes purposeful, keeps evolving, technical behavior needs to be replaced by socio-technical behavior. It’s very important for any high performing organization to leverage the systematic understanding of interconnectivity, get the best alignment and leverage the collective human potential that exists or is needed to achieve great results and to tap into the passion of the people.

Contemporary companies are dynamic systems that would perhaps be disturbed by nonlinear events. Thus, it’s important to understand interfaces and interactions associated with complex business systems, engenders fresh perspectives or decisive actions as part of the process of creating a cross-disciplined understanding and building dynamic business competency. Technically, the organic system potential portfolio includes business initiatives that can strengthen the organizational strength and develop core business competencies to unlock business potential - the “future of performance.”

In an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world, the problems become over-complex and interconnected. Many companies stagnate in business transformation, it is a waste of resources to leave any valuable potential left unrecognized, untapped and unused. Unleashing organizational systems potential expands the new horizon for us to see and do things innovatively. To create synergy and unleash digital potential, organizations need to fine-tune their business system and process, identify business strength, develop core competencies and improve overall business maturity.

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Innovation

The pace of change is significantly increasing, innovation is the only path and the core activity of human evolution to changing the environment for unlocking business performance, profit, resource optimization, and customer satisfaction, etc.

Innovation is never for its own sake, but to achieve high business value. The digital era upon us is about people and innovation. Often creative outcomes come from recombining ideas in different ways to create fresh ideas or the new ways to solve problems. 

The big “why” clarity about innovation helps to understand the noble business purpose behind innovation efforts. Forward-looking companies gain the knowledge of evident customer needs, develop innovative products or services to delight them.

Innovation & assumption: Organizations across industries are facing unprecedented uncertainty and complexity, nothing is certain with the rapid knowledge flow, you have to make assumptions or “forecasts” to deal with emergent innovation opportunities and avoid risks. So you have to collect enough information, listen to different point of views, and sometimes it can be very worthwhile to spend more time on solving problems innovatively. The good assumptions are based on multidimensional thinking and knowledge-based perception and forecasting. You may find an insight you didn't find before, generate fresh ideas and catalyze innovation.

Do not always follow the conventional wisdom or preconceived opinions. In highly innovative organizations, people are encouraged to challenge old assumptions, embrace different perspectives, update knowledge, and apply different ways to solve problems. People might never have complete information for decision-making; and sometimes, they need to leverage their gut feeling, make assumptions if making sense, have the right dose of risk appetite to innovation, and be wiser to avoid the same or worst mistake if possible.

Innovation & paradoxes: With “VUCA” new normal, there are many concepts that seem to be opposite, indeed, they are complementary, such as simplicity vs. complexity; innovation vs. standardization; individualism vs. collectivism; paradoxes are conflicting choices or conditions that demand equal attention. Paradoxes spur innovation because it helps people see things from different viewpoints, connect the wider dots even if they are opposite in order to generate fresh ideas and catalyze innovation.

Paradoxical logic stimulates creative intelligence. Interdisciplinarity and paradox are the rare dots that need to be connected to the next level of innovation. In practice, the paradox fluency is about the balance of asking and answering; inducting & deducting, analyzing & synthesizing, etc. You don’t need to agree completely with the other side's viewpoint, but you can always gain empathy, insight to see things from the other angle, and have an open mind for gaining updated information to spur creativity, apply an interdisciplinary management approach with paradoxical logic to improve autonomy and catalyze innovation.

Innovation & implication: Innovation investment and management are crucial for the business’s future success. Organizations and their people learn through their interactions with the environment. They act, observe the consequences of their action, make inferences about those consequences, and draw implications for future action. The innovative companies continuously invest in their team’s skills, balance control and autonomy, define innovation performance indicators which take into consideration the possible implication on creating unique business value.

Each organization or team is different, so innovation processes cannot be fully preplanned. Keep alert, a once of innovation theory and a set of innovation practices are both needed to improve innovation management effectiveness. Great ideas that work great in the context of a lab, but it can't be reproduced in "the wild." There are theories and ideas that, when presented well, can inspire, but get no traction in the application. How many breathless science articles come out filled with the implications and possibilities of a certain new technological breakthrough, but we haven’t yet realized these possibilities. It’s important to keep learning agile, being able to foster a workplace that thrives on collaboration, social interaction and forward thinking for building innovation competency.

The pace of change is significantly increasing, innovation is the only path and the core activity of human evolution to changing the environment for unlocking business performance, profit, resource optimization, and customer satisfaction, etc. Highly innovative enterprises proactively develop the information-savvy and resource-rich innovation hubs and hyper-connected digital clusters across enterprise ecosystems for enabling idea flow and creating synergy to growth, making knowledge alignment to enhance collective learning and enforce collective creativity.

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