Friday, January 6, 2023

Innovationrisks

The more dramatic and powerful the innovation is, the greater the risk would be.

Innovation in its basic nature is a high risk area; more often you are doing something that hasn't been done before, so innovation has a very low success rate statistically. Innovation risk management would need to be flexible and applicable to a dynamic situation, where innovation strategies are changing frequently. 

Companies compete on innovation. Innovation managers demonstrate rational risk management skills to weigh risks and rewards, they may be forced to take risks that others would not take to meet shareholder expectations, and manage risks systematically.

Innovation risk appetite: Innovation is risky; organizations have limited resources, how to set the right levels of risk appetite and risk tolerance? What could be seen as a fair determinant of taking an innovation initiative is to view innovation as risk and to assess the risk based on projections of success and to approve/disapprove based on the board's comfort level, and to guide the senior management team to formulate a good innovation strategy.

The positive attitude for inspiring innovation is to be cautiously optimistic, practice critical thinking, be alert about obstacles or pitfalls, and take calculated risks in innovation management. Good innovation leaders have excellent attitudes toward innovation, set the right dose of innovation appetite to manage a healthy innovation portfolio with the right mix of incremental innovation and breakthrough innovation, and take calculated risks to inspire good innovation initiatives for improving innovation success.

Innovation cost optimization: Innovation has risks because it comes with the cost and unsure outcomes. From a financial management perspective, consider what capital you are prepared to risk in making the innovation - try not to let this be so much that losing it will cripple your business. It’s important to do financing or competitor analysis, deepen market understanding, identify the space of opportunity, define the scalability of the innovation efforts, what timescale to allow before making a go/no-go decision. Otherwise, it cannot obtain the funding to continue to move towards fulfilling its core mission.

Innovation process review & refinement:
Most companies fail at innovation execution because they have no clear process, nor understand the linkage required to work horizontally to managing innovation holistically. Silos don't seem to fit within emerging hyper-connected, collaborative organizational forms, and if they are being reinforced, their existence is perhaps a legacy of old management thinking applied to stifle innovation. An obsession with the rigidity of efficiency also stunts the innovation creation process. Efficiency and short-term goal orientation often divert focus from innovation in general. 

Thus, innovation structures, processes, methods, toolkits need to be reviewed, and optimized to achieve innovation excellence. The innovation management can be iterative, evolutionary, revolutionary, or disruptive. It takes the holistic approach to tune it in a way that it brings the business benefit via the mid or long term. There are many components in effective innovation management. Each component by itself may not cause a good environment, but collectively, they can build dynamic innovation competencies.

Due to the hyper-complexity of modern businesses, innovation has become more intense with broader content or enriched context for managing people, assets, time, resources, and risks to achieve high-performance business goals. The more dramatic and powerful the innovation is, the greater the risk would be. Don’t be afraid of failures, but you have to learn something from your failure, to manage a healthy innovation portfolio with the right mix of incremental innovation and breakthrough innovation smoothly.


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