Sunday, June 18, 2023

Innovation

Holistic innovation discipline includes policy, structure, and program that innovation managers can use to drive innovation systematically.

Innovation is similar to "the sum is larger than its parts" for creating unique value. In essence, innovation management is about how to manage people, assets, time, resources, and risks to achieve high-performance business goals. Innovation has become more intense with broader content or enriched context. 

Holistic innovation management is critical to overcome complexity, set the right priority and manage a balanced innovation portfolio in a rapidly changing world. 


It’s important to harness holistic understanding of the interdependent business ecosystem to develop innovation competency: Being innovative is the state of mind to think and do things from a new angle; it’s about how to disrupt the outdated thinking and the old way to do things. Holistic thinking is the thought process for seeing interrelationships rather than isolated things, from seeing patterns of change rather than static “snapshots”; understanding people as unique persons rather than just human resources.

Usually holistic understanding involves diverse thought processes such as divergent thinking, nonlinear logic, integral understanding, to connect wider dots and catalyze innovation. Holistic innovation requires interdisciplinary knowledge and systematic approach to deal with today’s over-complex business dynamic environment, encouraging innovation exploration within the ecosystem to generate multifaceted value successfully.

It’s important to set innovation as top priority because it matters for both business’s survival and long term thriving: Organizations have limited resources, often, they spend too much time on keeping the lights on, leaving very little for innovation. To achieve innovation excellence, you need to let the fact patterns tell you what it needs; improve financial and human capital investment effectiveness scientifically, not force fit an arbitrary assumption about what priorities must be. Organizations need to build innovation capacity, make technological commitment, improve vendor quality, engage employees, and foster customer relationship management.

As an innovation leader, you need to be informative, but selective. Otherwise, you might be swallowed by the whirl of information. It’s critical to look deeply into the future which can have a profound effect on where you go, and how you get there. There are large-scale problems which can be solved by dynamic planning and innovation practices with the right priority setting. Looking both broadly and deeply can help to identify the real problems that matter, and on a scale that can make a difference. 

Innovation complexity has to be reduced to actionable, overriding variables, which must be managed: There are needed complexities such as design complexity that competitors cannot imitate easily; or the collaboration complexity that makes people more productive and business agiler. But there are also complications that need to be eliminated to encourage simplicity (easy to use, intuition). Identify those critical variables, which are contextual, fine-tune them in managing complexity smoothly to harness innovation.

When a business becomes overly complex and people get frustrated and annoyed by not being able to accomplish things easily, innovation is stifled. Overly rigid rules, too “pushy goals,” “over-control” or micromanagement stifles innovation. It’s important to keep optimizing innovation processes by breaking down management obstacles and make innovation processes as visible and company-wide as possible. Leverage effective technologies, tools or methodologies with the right expertise to manage a balanced portfolio with the right mix of radical innovation and incremental innovation, develop innovation competency.

Holistic innovation discipline includes policy, structure, and program that innovation managers can use to drive innovation systematically. Innovation management needs to ask tough questions, take a disciplined innovation approach to set the right priority, align resource, process, talent seamlessly, cultivate a culture of creativity, manage risks and improve innovation management success rate significantly.

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