Innovation

Innovation is in the eye of the beholders. Because innovation is about seeing things from different angles or solving problems in different ways.

Running a purposeful business is fundamentally an iterative problem-solving continuum. Being innovative doesn’t mean everything is going rogue; but about solving problems in alternative ways. A high-innovative business has more discipline, not less. 

Innovation leaders systematically address the innovation strategy agenda, encourage themselves and subordinates to practice out of the box thinking, bring fresh perspectives and new designs to delight customers and achieve high-quality results over a sustainable period of time.

Breakthrough innovation is anything new to businesses; or purists want to call it as ‘new to the world’: It’s something that no one else has done before; really original. In other words, to think of breakthrough innovation, you may have to rise up to the top level or even at the business strategy level to make a difference. Breakthrough or radical innovation brings something that was not existing before at all, by creating or gathering information, updating technologies or optimizing processes, in order to bring new steps that can open to other innovations and enhancement. It focuses to "replace" conventional value streams with the new one, supported or filled with noble knowledge and ideas.

Idea management processes are crucial to speed up innovation development cycles and improve organizational innovation success rate: Some crisis situations, often with more frequent digital disruptions, will require innovative processes; where a conventional style would be troublesome. There is no magic formula to generate or implement creative ideas, especially for breakthrough innovation, there are significant risks in it. Innovators of the highest order will get intrinsic rewards from the process but still, need validation. The true innovative leaders give the freedom to employees to do anything new and even if it fails, they learn from it and grow only to make better products in future.

Ideas should be managed via collaborative platforms, tailored processes, flexible structures, and highly effective innovation management teams who can initiate innovation dialogues about purposes, methodologies or practices, developing a common understanding, creating the necessity and motivation, and orchestrating a broader spectrum of innovations. 

Bridging innovation execution gap to achieving the business objectives requires a contracted execution scenario: The gap between 'strategy execution' and ‘innovation execution' is the reality. On one side, innovation strategy is a subcomponent of corporate strategy; thus, innovation portfolio management is an integral part of strategy implementation. On the other hand, innovation has high risks, and sometimes it takes time and lots of resources to develop into fruity; the science of innovation needs to set clear stages, performance thresholds combined with an iterative, experiential learning process that supports wide-ranging exploration at each stage.

A high-innovative business has more discipline, not less. It’s crucial to optimize budget and resources, build a balanced innovation portfolio with the right mix of incremental innovation and breakthrough innovation. If innovation fails, the management needs to do deep analysis: Is it caused by the silo mentality, overly restricted organizational hierarchy with the “command & control” management style, inflexible process, outdated technologies, or even dysfunctional business systems? Does an obsession with the rigidity of efficiency stunts the innovation creation process? Did you put the right people in the right position to solve the right problems creatively? Organizations need to have all different talents for innovation, such as idea creator, translator, implementer, stabilizer, or navigator, etc. Innovative development team members exhibit creative traits that make them better able to generate, discover, or manage good ideas, have the sound judgment to know what’s important and solve business problems collaboratively.

Innovation is in the eye of the beholders. Because innovation is about seeing things from different angles or solving problems in different ways. Systematic innovation is a structured process and set of practical tools used to design, build or improve products/services/processes that deliver new value to customers or satisfy employees consistently. New innovation practices continue to be developed and there should always be an objective to become even better. In fact, best practices should change and evolve over time. A high mature digital organization can handle innovation streams for different purposes and with different time frames, to make continually deliveries with consistent high performance.

Posted in: Innovation