Innovation

Companies compete on innovation. The broader the scope, scale, and impact of the change, the more one leans towards calling such change an innovation.

Innovation is to “make meaningful connections”; generate fresh ideas and transform them into commercially successful products or services for achieving business values. Innovation can be developed in an open, creative environment, and delivered in many different ways. 

If you do not innovate, you become commoditized and even irrelevant for the long run. Innovation allows one to stand out and make difference, individually or collectively.

Innovation & progress: Innovation is the most needed change. Generally speaking, innovation has a very low success rate. Either incremental innovation or breakthrough innovation, innovation is about making progress, Innovation is neither a serendipity nor a pre-described management practice. Innovation is more often a teamwork. A progressive mind is all about the desire to learn, grow and make continuous progress. The variety of perspectives opens our mind to reach the state of innovativeness and accelerate our collective progress. The heterogeneous team with cognitive differences and complementary skills is more insightful and innovative than the homogeneous group setting.

Innovation is a process that can be managed from mindset to attitude to behavior. Innovation process is not overly rigid, but flexible and coherent, involving experimentation, trial, error, analysis, reviews, and performance measurement, etc. Innovation progress can be made if organizations can fine tune the processes to make idea flows, build the business capacity for innovation consistently and improve overall innovation access rate progressively.

Innovation & leadership integrity: If vision is about the "end" status, then innovation is the means to the end.. The purpose and effectiveness of innovation depend on the leadership attitude to drive innovation and its aptitude to manage innovation. Leadership is influence, innovation leadership makes a significant impact on people’s mindset, attitude and behavior, encouraging people to think independently and act courageously to get the work done in a better way. 

Leadership integrity enhances innovation governance principles and practices. Because integrity allows the management to be responsible and accountable, improves business transparency, effectiveness, builds a culture of trust, and leads to high mature business management disciplines. Constant and consistent Integrity requires vision and value proposition. Organizations should develop integrity as one of the core values of a corporation; it requires picking the right senior executive team, ensuring effective governance and partnering with c-level executives to take the company forward innovatively.

Innovation logic: Innovation is not serendipitous. Effective innovation management requires a variety of logic as the hidden clue, to interweave a holistic innovation system and develop more innovators. The interactive logic is just so simple; the meaningful interactions stimulate idea generation and sharing; cross-boundary communication and collaboration harness innovation via sharing knowledge, creating fresh insight, connecting wider dots to generate fresh ideas.

Innovation is an art to design intuitive products/services; also, innovation is a scientific process with strong logic to improve its success rate. The retrosynthetic logic behind innovation is about envisioning an ideal product; the “target,” and then, taking it back a step at a time. It starts with what you want to see or have; then, think backward from there to what the next simpler step is; and then, back to what are the next simpler components, back to what you have at hand.

Companies compete on innovation. The broader the scope, scale, and impact of the change, the more one leans towards calling such change an innovation. Innovation requires a much deeper whole system, and takes emergent, generative, iterative and integrative approaches. Innovation requires a suitable process as part of the holistic 'system'; encompassing different aspects such as talent, processes, culture, leadership, and strategy, create the “atmosphere” to inspire creativity, and improve the overall innovation success rate.

Posted in: Innovation,Leadership Master