Saturday, March 26, 2022

Innovation

Innovation management needs to connect wider dots, lay out different thinking, structures, and best practices, to allow business to develop into its potential.

With frequent disruptions and fierce competitions in the business ecosystem, individuals or organizations simply cannot stand still, never innovate or make progress. There are many ways to differentiate and, therefore, there are many ways to pursue innovation. 

There is more flow of creative ideas, the innovation pie actually gets bigger. The good or bad innovation would depend on the business’s attitude to connect the right dots and nourish a culture of creativity, its aptitude to manage ideas and improve the success rate of innovation.

Innovation & sufficiency: Innovation is about thinking differently, making difference and pursuing alternative ways to do things. To breakthrough thinking ceilings, you need to be able to observe deeper and see around the corner, perceive the invisible behind the visible, recognize the connections and interdependence, gain sufficient knowledge and unique insight. and transcend the interdisciplinary knowledge to spur creativity.

From an innovative problem-solving perspective, the mental models through which you understand things deeply influence how you imagine the future, recognize the connections and interdependence. Thus, knowledge sufficiency is crucial to have an in-depth understanding of cause and effect based on the identification of relationships and behaviors within a model, context, or scenario to get to the heart of the matter, develop other virtues like non-egoism, self-control, self-sufficiency, and self-reliance in order to solve problems in an alternative way.

Innovation & sophistication: There are both known unknown and unknown unknown; there is always some remaining uncertainty and emerging properties. Business management needs to be able to deal with “VUCA” reality, develop sophisticated innovation capabilities which are unique, hard to copy, to build differentiated business advantages. Innovation nowadays is rarely an individual activity, but collaborative team efforts. Innovation sophistication is not the same as complication. One of the very goals for innovation management is to simplify the old way to do things or to manage complexity in an optimal manner. The unnecessary complexities such as overly complicated processes or rigid rules perhaps stifle innovation as organizations get locked into huge processes around building extensive business cases to innovation.

All businesses have certain capabilities, including innovation. What matters is digital capability sophistication and maturity (efficiency, effectiveness, and agility). As sophisticated capability is an acquired and organized "ability" within a company and takes hard work to put in place, it can therefore not be transferred because of the degree of organizational learning and organization that goes with it. Innovation management is both art and science. That means we need to be humble and admit we can't control anything beforehand, let things flow naturally; let ideas click spontaneously; let people do things in their own way and also have some fun. Sophisticated leaders and professionals are intelligent and innovative; entrepreneurial and insightful; set the guidance for creating something new, focus on the nature of interconnectivity rather than just on isolated entities. That is the essence of sophisticated innovation management discipline.

Innovation & plasticity:
Creative disruption acts as a catalyst for business growth and innovation. Growth is not possible unless people are willing to move out of their comfort zone and demonstrate learning plasticity to continually grow and innovate. Digital learning is multidimensional, dynamic, interactive, informal and integrated. Whatever we sense as a human being, there is a methodology behind that: see it, sense it, get it processed in the brain, react, learn, and demonstrate learning plasticity. Collectively, organizational learning plasticity is an important digital trait to keep the business competitive and build innovation capability.

In management practice, there is no single initiative or program that will suffice to raise the plasticity of individuals, functions, businesses. Every organization needs to learn some good theories, develop tailored innovation practices via leveraging effective tools or methodologies and use them wisely with the expertise to really add value or drive innovation. The emerging digital technologies such as social platforms and collaboration tools provide a flexible way to learn, share and collaborate, apply the acquired knowledge and lessons learned to succeed in new situations, connect wider dots for sparking creativity and catalyzing innovation.

Innovation is the management discipline to reduce business complexity or increase revenue. Innovation management needs to connect wider dots, lay out different thinking, structures, and best practices, to allow business to develop into its potential in which organizations are combining all that is available to them in imaginative or advantageous ways to achieve the “art of possible.”

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