Innovation

You have to overcome different barriers carefully and manage innovation in the right way with the right elements, both visible and invisible systematically to achieve consistent business results.

We no longer live in the world that runs in years, but one that runs in minutes. A new paradigm arises out of fresh mindsets, updated knowledge, and people-centric innovation. Creativity is an innate process to generate fresh ideas. Innovation is a managed process to capture business trends, figure out what the customers’ needs & wants, share unique business insight as to what innovation capacity can provide, retool innovation management for building unique innovation competency.

It is important to create conditions so that the creative potential can manifest: Innovative people are inspired to think and work proactively to stimulate new energy, letting the fountain of creativity flow frictionlessly. You can feel creative tension when you sense the freedom to be creative, the harmony not via compliance only, but through independent thinking, idea-sharing, collaborative implementation. The right dose of creative tension helps to encourage healthy competitions, expand the bigger thinking box and take a balanced approach to manage innovation.

You can't build trust or motivation effectively if you don't engage with people. You can’t build a competitive team without talented people who demonstrate complementary understanding, capabilities and experience. Let people explore where their creative energy is, align their energy to work at hand, and motivate them to think and do things innovatively. The right tension between innovation and process is actually healthy because organizations indeed need both, and in fact, cannot really exist without a healthy balance of both to improve innovation performance.

An inclusive working environment can harness creative communication, stimulate creativity: People have different intent, personality traits, working styles, effective inclusion efforts and empathetic communication can bridge innovation gaps and build a complementary team to generate creative results regularly. How creative the working environment is depends on the individuals composing that collective and depends on the rationale for the gathering of people. The organizational inclusiveness efforts need to focus on cognitive differences, unique capabilities, and the wealth of ideas since the value lies in the contributions of the individual to the organization.

Leaders and their teams are responsible for inclusion. Innovation success as the value of inclusiveness lies in the contributions of the individual to the organization. Would a diverse group of people come up with a more out-of-box idea/solution than a group of identical people? Creative spark does not always originate solely in the individual. Only in an open trustful and inclusive workplace, creative ideas can flow smoothly and innovation can be catalyzed effortlessly.

A considerably loose and circular process is essential to manage innovation effectively and develop a balanced innovation portfolio: Most companies fail at innovation execution because they have no clear processes, nor understand the linkage required to work horizontally and take a holistic but flexible approach to manage innovation. The management needs to clarify: Do innovations fail because there are too many disconnects that occur between the birth of a concept and the process of turning it into a reality? Is there transparency in follow-up of a system of the innovation process from the idea up to the implementation? With continuous process improvements, you can develop a powerful idea pipeline, reduce costs and increase the innovation success rate.

The main process barriers to innovation are silos, rigidity, inflexibility, stagnation, or bureaucracy, etc. The right level of guidance and process is important, but overly rigid processes with heavy logistics will create bottlenecks and stifle innovation. An organization that has a lightweight process which allows creativity to flow, get protected and channeled will succeed more often than an organization that does not have such a process. So innovation excellence involves turning organizational structures, processes and the ecosystem to match the current stack rank of areas in which innovation will reap the most significant benefit.

Either at the individual or business level, innovation performance is mostly a mix of past and present; flexibility and disciplines. You have to overcome different barriers carefully and manage innovation in the right way with the right elements, both visible and invisible systematically to achieve consistent business results.

Posted in: Creativity,Innovation,IT Innovation