Levels of Innovation Maturity

Changeability and innovation competency directly impacts business’s long term competency.

Compared to the business world decades ago, the speed of change is increasing, and the digital ecosystem has become more complex and dynamic, to put simply, change itself changes. Change or innovation Management turns out to be more complex, that’s perhaps part of the reason why the failure rate of Innovation Management is so stubbornly high. Innovation is the most needed change. Many traditional organizations still run in the reactive mode, lagging behind the change curve. But driving innovation is not a passive activity, organizations need to make a smooth transition from reactive to proactive, from taking a few random initiatives to taking a structural discipline; recharge business energy and proactively improve innovation management maturity.

Ad-hoc – reactive: There are a multitude of changes such as organizational change, technological change, and behavioral change. There are a variety of innovations such as incremental innovation, breakthrough innovation. For quite lots of organizations that get stuck at the low level of business maturity, change is performed on an ad-hoc basis. Ad hoc means on-off, narrow and tactical, reactionary, or unplanned, etc. Traditional change management based on the overly rigid business processes and organizational hierarchy causes bureaucratic management redundancy and runs in silo. At this level, it’s a fairly immature organization, businesses get stuck and innovation gets stifled.

Running a digital business is a dynamic change management continuum. There are both hard and soft ingredients in innovation or change success. Many managers focus on the tangibles, but they lack an in-depth understanding of the intangible elements in change management. There are both psychological curves and knowledge/ skill/capacity/methodological curves for changes. Silos introduce lots of delays, ad hoc, waste, queues, and bottlenecks, etc. It is important to strike the right balance between chaos and order. Find a regularity in chaos, and recognize chaos in a regularity. Either driving change or leading innovation, management needs to have change curve awareness by understanding change psychologically, economically, and anthropologically, objectively estimating how much change capabilities are really required for the effort you are kicking off.

Structural –Defined: Change is not a one-time business initiative, but an ongoing business capability. Strong change discipline is defined, executed and repeatable. In face of continuous disruptions, the management processes need to be dynamic, robust and structural to keep businesses flow and ensure the organization as a whole is more than the sum of its parts. It involves the multidimensional analysis and multistage processes. Well defined Change Management with fine-tuned process and seamless alignment will greatly reduce frictions and practically eliminate the fear of change that derails good or even great intentions, and have a better opportunity to achieve business and customer expectations.

The structural change/innovation management practices are scientific engineering disciplines and take defined practices to manage an insightful organization in gaining contextual intelligence, sensing opportunities, predicting risks, achieving the high-performance business result and maximizing the digital potential of the business. The innovative businesses are the ones that can manage change fluently, improve innovation success rate in a structural way.

Optimized & measurable: Change impact analysis and business readiness are two key processes that need to be conducted to give management a glimpse of what to measure. Measuring change involves first accurately identifying where you are now, then clearly identifying where you want to be once the change is complete. Both require the necessity to be honest and to establish clear, understandable, and easily calculable metrics. Results are qualitatively predictable

There is a focus on continually improving the discipline performance. Measured - Quantitative goals are clearly set and measured. Ensure these measures are both quantitative and qualitative, follow the “SMART” principle - Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound, Also, keep in mind; measures are not just numbers, but stories. Every measure selected should be part of a link of cause-and-effect relationships, and ultimately affect the growth and long-term perspectives of the organization.

Changeability and innovation competency directly impacts business’s long term competency. Besides hard factors such as process, technology, talent, leadership, communication, culture, and engagement are the intangibles or the “soft factors,” to successful change or lack thereof is the problem. It’s also crucial to understand the interconnectivity between parts and the whole, interdependence of the digital business ecosystem, to improve performance and expedite changes proactively and holistically.

Posted in: Change Management,Digital Maturity,Innovation