Innovation

You can’t imagine a successful innovation process without its continuous improvement.

The purpose of innovation management is to manage innovation in a structural way. Innovation Management needs to take a balanced approach to deal with complex circumstances; provide maximal freedom for ideators, connect wider dots to spur creativity, and take an optimized process for converting an idea to achieve its commercial value.

Innovation & coherence: Creative coherence is about how to “translate” creativity in a structural way, not through linear processes, but with integral, interactive and iterative thinking activities to develop novel ideas, and then move forward, leverage innovation processes to achieve their business value. People with creative coherence can use their whole brain, to synchronize multiple thought processes, conscious and subconscious thinking, logic and intuition, analysis and synthesis, divergent and convergent thinking, assemble coherence from seemingly unrelated phenomena, to come out with fresh ideas.

Logic plus consistency lead to coherence. Innovation shouldn’t be just serendipity, but a structural process that can be managed. The process coherence will directly impact innovation effectiveness. Innovation coherence is based on having a deeper understanding of the drivers of value in the specific markets, the imagination to do things differently and enhancing structural creativity.

Innovation & inquisitiveness: Inquisitiveness stimulates imagination; amplifies influence and accelerates improvement. Creative people ask questions, usually, they ask open questions or questions no one else would think of, with the goal to identify blind spots or mind gaps, in order to identify the issues behind the scenes. Perhaps the underlying issue is one of understanding the application of creativity rather than the identification of a situation that demands a specific solution. Inquisitiveness leads to the vision, vision further drives inquisitiveness to see things differently.

An inquisitive mind with confidence does not accept things at face value and keep discovering a better or an alternative solution. Observing, questioning, connecting, networking are the key steps in creativity. It's about how to build a creative working environment to encourage people stepping out of the “comfort zone”; showing a willingness to imaginatively explore, an ability to evaluate the imaginative proposals for 'appropriateness' and a capacity to translate those ideations into some form of unambiguous approach for innovative problem-solving.

Innovation & proficiency: The digital era we live in is about exponential growth of information and abundant knowledge. Knowledge is the soil to sprout creativity seeds. Business leaders or professionals should have the proficient knowledge to practice the expert power, with the ability to master the variety of business dialects, and leverage interdisciplinary domain knowledge to come up with alternative solutions. It is important to identify and close the gap between knowledge and insight, help digital leaders and professionals to be not overwhelmed by the exponential growth of information and abundant knowledge, and capture the valuable business insight to spur innovation.

Sometimes lack of creativity becomes a problem after many people refuse to deal with it for various reasons. If traditional organizations are often operated inside-out based on inefficient processes or deficient resources. Digital businesses should focus on building capability and proficiency via outside-in customer lens. They should have a proficient understanding of their particular organization's current and potential corporate structure, senior management style, strategic plan, and expert power, with the ability to master the variety of business dialects, move from one conversation to the other seamlessly, lubricate business relationships and improve innovation effectiveness.

You can’t imagine a successful innovation process without its continuous improvement. A corporation needs processes and culture to sustain cross-boundary engagement to discover external ideas, an interdisciplinary knowledge and expertise to manage those ideas to achieve business values. It’s also critical to cultivate a culture which inspires creativity, people are motivated to accept external ideas and rapidly integrate them into innovative internal ideas, help companies think systematically about business innovation, raise its success rate to meet the business’s expectations and improve innovation effectiveness, maturity.

Posted in: Innovation