Innovation

 Innovation is a differentiated business competency.

Innovation is utilizing what you already have in a unique and creative way that has not been done before and using that thing to generate value. It is invaluable in the management of the innovation workflow, decision-making, process optimization, capability integration. Innovation management takes a balancing act to have enough failure and build an environment that encourages learning from failure quickly and cost-effectively, without having failures that are too frequent or too expensive. 

Organizations need to filter, prototype, and validate potential innovative solutions: Nowadays innovation is complex, usually it’s not an individual's effort, there are multiple innovation personas who can leverage new or variations of existing processes and methods to create ideas or implement them effectively. Both culture and strategy are important to innovation, accessing the maximum number of potentially good ideas for designing, prototyping, and developing innovative solutions.

 

Innovation explorers develop unconventional, even disruptive solutions, then, when ideas are fully developed and a prototype built, innovation builders take over and work on serial production and sustaining innovation to make products or services more reliable, easier to make, and cost-effective. Do not be afraid to make fine adjustments as idea implementation is underway. 

 

Innovation prototyping and implementation are far more “process driven,” with actions in sequence: If the idea generation process is less structured than development; then designing a prototype solution is more science, process driven. Business processes have a predictable outcome, so processes can easily be identified with goals. The practice of systematic innovation can focus on translating from the innovation system to the business process which can be managed in a structural way. 

 

Innovation processes can be managed. Identify and evaluate opportunities where important problems need to be solved; involve customers in product design, prototyping; engage employees in idea brainstorming and management. Get away from a preconceived solution if you believe that the proposed solution is not what is best for the company or the customer. Take a logical scenario for brainstorming-designing-prototyping-producing-evaluating to improve innovation success.

 

 

Innovation happens when the business initiative seeks to prototype and  "evaluate" a potential product or a technology solution to a problem: It's important to note that within the organization, innovation is rarely an individual action, rather, it’s a collaborative effort across multiple organizational silos, and it needs to be managed systematically to improve its success rate. There are usually initiatives that seek to place the business into a new vantage point -looking for the “jump.” It requires leaders to communicate a clear vision, think out of the box, bend some rules in order to discover the new path of growth, take the courage for experimenting, and then scale the best and next innovation management practices. 

 

A high-mature organization always looks for opportunities across the business ecosystem to increase the usage of emergent digital technologies, explore growth opportunities accordingly and charter innovation paradigm shifts seamlessly. 

 

There are many areas within a company where the innovation process can be applied to create value. It is important to look at innovation from the perspective of developing business-wide innovation capabilities. The good or bad innovation would depend on the business’s attitude to take calculated risks and business aptitude to manage innovation. Innovation is a differentiated business competency.

 

Posted in: Creativity,Innovation