InitiativesofGlobalStrangers

With all those great global strangers, we won’t feel disappointed, we are not alone in the fresh places, we appreciate the bigger, better world.

In recent months, I traveled overseas to participate in book fairs and open-minded trade shows, met numerous great strangers who helped me out, from showing directions to lifting luggage to providing local “treats & tricks.” We all belong to the global society, no matter where we live, who we are, and what we do, people enjoy helping others, that is humanity. 

The majority of cities I visited are world famous metropolitan areas in which people are nice, polite, well educated, and make global tourists like myself feel warm and welcomed in varying places. Those global strangers are diverse and dynamic, same and different, we barely know their name, who they are, what they do, but they all offer some help which make my world trip more enjoyable and impressive. 

Help to point out directions:  Nowadays, the world is so hyper-connected and interdependent, digital technology brings unprecedented convenience to how we work and live. Although my smartphone maps can navigate some directions for me, quite a lot of details are not so clear. So I have to ask, and I enjoy asking those global strangers. Almost all of them do their best to help out.  I try to recognize local residents through “anthropological sense.”  Many of them take out their smartphones. navigate through and show me the directions. They take such efforts very seriously, and they also seem to feel happy about doing so.

 

As I barely know the phone area code in many regions, lady strangers help me call the hotels, ask further about directions, and gentleman strangers are also warm-hearted, helping to show the way. Sometimes, on the road, if the person I asked couldn’t figure out immediately, other strangers overheard the conversation, participated in conversations and helped further, or followed up, ensuring I am heading in the right direction, taking the right bus/train, or getting to the right entrance. A few of them even drove me to the hotels or train stations.

Help to lift luggage: There are complex and advanced subway systems in the regions I visited in Asia and Europe. In smaller stations, there are only stairs, no elevators. People offer help for lifting my luggage, that would also help a lot, make the trip more easy-going, make me light-hearted, and appreciate the new places.

 When you immerse yourselves into the dynamic and diverse crowd here and there, you feel you are part of an advanced global society, you are not alone, you are moving forward, opening your mind, exploring the surroundings, to feel the pulse of a modern world with all those great strangers.

 

Provide local “Treat & Tricks”: Not all information you fetched from the internet is accurate, quite lots of them are outdated. That’s why you have to ask if things are not going smoothly. Great global strangers provide you their local “treat”, avoid “tricks,” warm you up.

 From introducing a good restaurant to recommending a beautiful place to visit, sometimes it goes beyond your expectation, you feel more like a locale, and make your trip more fulfilling. 

 The world has become much more complex and smaller all at once. A global trip is an adventure, opening our eyes to a spectrum of things with so many different shades and colors of the same world; expanding our vision of society, cultural diversity, and people dynamism. With all those great global strangers, we won’t feel disappointed, we are not alone in the fresh places, we appreciate the bigger, better world. We gain confidence about the human society as a whole, we are advancing humanity progressively. 

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Illumination

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking of new ideas; sharing and innovating.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 10 million page views with 11,600+ blog postings in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc.

The “Digital Master” book series includes 29 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to businesses and society. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Here is the weekly insight of innovation leadership, IT Management, and Talent Management.

• Innovatepublishing All organizations and industries should reinvent themselves for harnessing innovation, renewing fresh energy, integrating old and new, and lead changes we all would like to see.Last week, I participated in a global book exhibition event in one of the culture-enriching cities of the world. Our society is now moving to the digital era of hyper-connectivity, interdependence with fierce competition. The audience of this fair is very diversified, and the agenda of the exhibition focuses on digitalization, globalization and innovation.

• Innovate Personalized Society We are at the intersection of the knowledge economy and the creative economy. Digital transformation we face means hyper-connectivity, interdependence, and information integration. Human society is at a turning point, and further evolution requires us to first change our thinking and extend it to step-wise actions.

• Innovationvalley We are slowly but steadily moving from the age of industrialization to the age of insight-based personalization with the digital-rich innovation hubs. Knowledge is narrower and more specific, while wisdom is more extensive and abstract. Wisdom comes from life experience or the result of knowledge transcendence. Knowledge helps you figure out the “how” – practice. Wisdom guides you to pursue “why”—principles. 

• Initiatescenariologic We have a predisposition to seeking patterns, or potentially in the pursuit of logic. Logic is crucial, it is an interdisciplinary approach which involves cognitive science, sociology, culturology, psychology, philosophy, ecology, etc, to predict and prevent certain critical problems from happening. Even though you couldn’t predict anything beforehand, you can always imagine different scenarios based on “lessons learned” with many experiences involved in current or in the past. Strategic scenario planning is to navigate through the digital dynamic, discover the path via unconventional thinking, believing in yourself and most importantly, in your team to achieve the high performing results. 

• InnovationBreakthrough Conclusion: Build Breakthrough Innovation Competency  With the increasing pace of changes and cutting-throat competitions, nowadays innovation can occur anywhere in the organization, and frankly, it has to occur in every aspect of the organization. To effectively respond to the digital dynamics, companies across vertical sectors must begin thinking about ways to build innovation competency, and broaden their ecosystems and revenue streams. 

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking of new ideas; sharing and innovating. It’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Innovation

To build a highly innovative organization, it’s important to make sure that your company is open minded to embrace diversified people, diverse perspectives, and prepare for multiple innovation scenarios.

People are same, also different; we are the same because we live in the same hyperconnected and interdependent world, use digital technology enabled tools to communicate and collaborate cross boundarily, learn, work and live more conveniently in the dynamic world now.

People are also different. with the diversity of thoughts, character, cognitive abilities, skills, styles. To bridge our difference, accelerate innovation and harmonize the better world, it's important to strengthen communication, deepen understanding, develop empathy and professional competency.

Strengthen multifaceted connectivity: The business system is complex and the organization needs to change frequently. There are different business dialects, communication styles, and organizational contexts are situation driven. There are gaps and cognitive spectrum limitation. To identify and strengthen missing links, business management, especially at the senior management level, needs to gain the contextual understanding of the inter-connectivity of both visible and invisible business success factor, lead iterative, evolutionary, revolutionary, or disruptive innovation accordingly.

The challenge for any business innovation is to fine-tune a successful structure that helps to empower people and enforce business relationships to unleash the collective potential. That starts with seamless communication and frictionless collaboration. The great communicators can communicate objectively with strong logic, clarity, and understanding. overcome those communication obstacles, master different business dialects and convey the right message in the right format to fit different audiences for strengthening business relationship links and improving communication effectiveness.

Harness interdisciplinary collaboration: As an innovator, you need to be vulnerable to hear the ideas challenged from a viewpoint different from your own for spurring creativity. Collaborative process management supports more-effective innovation execution through the usage of social software tools that augment human actions to better mirror the way work is performed. It’s critical to build an effective collaboration framework, set rules, align people, process and technology to bring diversified people together for a clearly defined vision, generate fresh ideas, create business synergy and achieve strategic goals effortlessly.

All forward-looking organizations intend to become people-centric business now. Social business process management resides at the intersection of business process and collaborative innovation activity. It's about understanding the nature correlation & connection of people, process, and technology. Collaboration becomes a whole lot easier if we give people the time to hear what they have to say and what they want to do without the constant distraction or unhealthy competition. Spending time with diversified people to find out what drives them; what their issues are; what their fears and perceptions might be. So innovation processes can be optimized to improve innovation success rate.

Amplify influence: There are things you can do to increase the likelihood of inspiration occurring. To innovate is to think and do things differently. There is innovation gaps, blind-spots, frictions. Great influencers are in demand to make a difference. Influencers define the true purpose as a helpful instrument to make influences consistently; they need a set of influencing tools to amplify influence impact effectively. Business professionals with solid interdisciplinary expertise have the ability to review the past and perceive the future based on their own knowledge and perception, they have the ability to identify key leverage points in which the non-proportional influence can be made. They can initiate cross-boundary communication to accelerate innovation.

It is possible to set the common principles to bridge the difference and amplify innovation. Great innovators are able to shape other people's views or opinions towards their own views or perspectives and push for progressive changes. Everyone has a voice and every voice carries weight. Influence is made via asserting, persuading, influencers present ideas via confident persuasion and interdisciplinary expertise, persuasive negotiation & idea exchanging, to get others’ see your point of view, make tradeoffs, enforce trust, harness communication, etc. In order to make profound influence to move the world forward, you must demonstrate high levels of cognitive intelligence, various skillsets, and have strong ethics, integrity, and empathy. You should keep developing professional competency, enforcing cross disciplinary conversation, developing the best and next practices to harness innovation

In the digital era of information abundance and fast pace of changes, never stop thinking, learning, and innovating. With clarified vision to innovate and strong leadership to influence, resourceful innovation leaders demonstrate the multidimensional competencies to formulate creative ideas or alternatives solutions to complex problems. Professional influence requires strong character, determination, discipline, dedication, practice, and persistence in the present and a continuum. To build a highly innovative organization, it’s important to make sure that your company is open minded to embrace diversified people, diverse perspectives, and prepare for multiple innovation scenarios.

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Innovatepublishing

The progress of the world needs to be pulled together and pushed forward by innovators, change agents across the globe, who can think globally, decide insightfully, and act determinately.

All organizations and industries should reinvent themselves for harnessing innovation, renew fresh energy, integrate old and new, and lead changes we all would like to see.

Last week, I participated a global book exhibition event in one of the culture-enriching cities of the world. Our society is now moving to the digital era of hyper-connectivity, interdependence with fierce competition. The audience of this fair is very diversified, and the agenda of the exhibition focuses on digitalization, globalization and innovation.

Viability: information is growing exponentially; the pace of change is increasing, the world becomes flattened and fluid, the border of knowledge domains is blurred, knowledge also gets stale sooner than what you thought about due to rapid change and exponential growth of information. This is particularly important for the publishing industry to digitizing and optimizing their processes to increase viability and accelerate the speed. Regardless which industry you are in, the silo processes should be broken down, and value-added solutions should delight different sorts of stakeholders. It’s strategic imperative to design a viable industry for enjoying a powerful tailwind.

The viable digital organizations are solid enough to give some sort of forms and meaning and open enough to its environment allowing the movement of information, ideas. all key factors interact in a dynamic. Viability is one of the very characteristics of the society to keep organizations thriving for the long term. Forethoughtful organizations leverage design thinking to reinvent an organization that can enforce collaboration and harness innovation by maintaining viability, and making strategic effects to improve innovation performance.

Diversity: Digitalization makes significant impacts on every aspect of the business from people, processes, to technology and capability both horizontally and vertically. The question of greater diversity bringing greater creativity always depends on what we're talking about. The first most successful societies were diverse mixtures of peoples. The words come from the thoughts. The diversity of thought is on demand, for boosting collective creativity and harness collective wisdom; for lifting the spirit of our society. This is particularly true for the publishing industry.

Diversity is the hotbed to spark creativity. Developing an effective globalization agenda requires us to be willing to listen to diverse viewpoints, broaden the perspective to fix misperceptions, break down old traditions, outdated knowledge, and create fresh insight. able to wear different perception glasses, experiment with different ways of doing the same things. Diversified audience of this event have a cogitative difference and diversified worldview for integrating significant building blocks of new and existing ideas and concepts. It is an excellent engine for creativity. People were brainstorming, sharing fresh ideas and personal experience; they challenge each other to have to translate/transform their PoVs into new expressions.

Globility: People with global background are more tolerant of cultures and customs other than their own, catalyze innovation and drive progressive changes. In order to reinvent a traditional industry, it's important to clarify the difference between local and global principles, common beliefs and global wisdom, develop a set of global rules & principles to synchronize, scale up and sustain change effects for harmonizing collective progress on the global scale.

Innovation can happen anywhere across the global organization and ecosystem. Global leaders and professionals envision an innovative global trends, continue to improve interdisciplinary knowledge proficiency, develop cultural empathy, and have a variety of professional experience dots to connect for spurring innovation. Global audience in this show desire to learn, open their minds to learn from global intellectuals or organization, to open up fresh ideas for collaboration, streamline people and process management, bring invaluable inputs and help the development of those ideas to enhance focus on commercially relevant compounds and achieve business value.

Although the information is abundant and knowledge are only clicks away, organizations and industries need fresh insight and foresight to move faster because knowledge can be outdated so soon and processes have frictions. When looking at global economy with creative people around the world, it’s important to develop an effective innovation agenda that keep moving the needles forward, overcoming frictions and cultural inertia, understand the cause-effect of many complex problems facing global society, in order to co-solving them smoothly.

Good exhibitions open people’s mind, great cultural activities encourage innovation. There is a pendulum swinging between people and process, engagement and hierarchy; the emergence of potential opportunities and risks for exploring digital is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern with accelerated speed. The progress of the world needs to be pulled together and pushed forward by innovators, change agents across the globe, who can think globally, decide insightfully, and act determinately.

 

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Innovationviapersonalization

Personalized social progress is the great trend, bright prospects and shared goals need to be achieved by strengthening advanced thinking and agile actions.

The digital era we face is about how to put people first, do deep observation and analysis, improve empathy, and promote personalized solutions. In a contemporary society with abundant information, cross-industry enterprises conduct data mining to deeply understand customers, provide personalized products/services/solutions, and develop advanced organizations and societies through continuous brainstorming, capability integration, as well as how to reshape business model, optimize processes, promote personalized education, career planning, and develop a personalized humane society,

Personalized Education: Everyone is unique, people are different not only because we look different, but also because we think differently and learn differently; communicate and interact with the world in different ways, do things and solve problems in different ways. The true goal of education is to help people discover themselves thoroughly, thereby developing their inner potential and growing into people they can be proud of. Today's professionals need to learn to think positively, develop a growth mindset, good learning habits, nurture creativity and build professional capabilities.

Personalized career planning: From the perspective of career development, people are usually more willing to stay in the "comfort zone" with reactive attitude, rather than proactively looking for career development opportunities. Many people get stuck at a certain stage in their careers, their potential has not been fully realized. To encourage career expansion and upgrading, attitude is important because it is a way of thinking and looking at problems. Self-assessment of attitudes and abilities is intended to enhance self-understanding, encourage genuine learning, stimulate growth awareness, strengthen trust, and participate in innovation.

Personalized society: Modern society is a dynamic entity of collective human progress. We are at the intersection of the knowledge economy and the creative economy. Digital transformation means globalization of hyper-connectivity, interdependence, and data integration. Human society is at a turning point, and further evolution requires us to first change our mindset, develop our wisdom, and put knowledge into practice with down-to-earth actions.

Whether at the corporate or social level, today's leaders need to understand the capability gaps in strategic management; look to the future and actively look for opportunities for improvement. To accelerate progress, organizational leaders need to innovate boldly, design a structure that continuously meets the needs of the business, and take further steps to maximize the human potential of individuals, businesses, and society.

Today's business environment is dynamic, complex, and full of uncertainty. There are always different complexities at different times or dimensions. Change is focused on the "now" and transformation is a journey that requires greater strategic investment – take step-wise changes in tools, culture, leadership, processes or overall management capabilities. Personalized social progress is the great trend, bright prospects and shared goals need to be achieved by strengthening advanced thinking and agile actions. Senior leaders need to be sensitive to emerging trends, pay attention to opportunities and risks on the way to reform persistently, guide enterprises and society in the right direction, and make a leap in collective human progress.

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Innovate Personalized Society

Personalized social progress is the general trend, and clearly-defined goals need to be achieved by promoting advanced ideas and agile actions.

We are at the intersection of the knowledge economy and the creative economy. Digital transformation we face means hyper-connectivity, interdependence, and information integration. Human society is at a turning point, and further evolution requires us to first change our thinking and extend it to step-wise actions.

Whether at the organizational or societal level, today's leaders need to understand strategic management capability gaps; look to the future and actively seek opportunities for improvement. Setting up a personalized society with humanized social progress is the general trend, and some goals need to be achieved by promoting advanced ideas and agile actions. Senior leaders need to be sensitive to emerging trends, pay attention to opportunities and risks on the way to reform, guide enterprises and society in the right direction, and make a leap in collective human progress. 

Personalized Solutions: Personalization is the process of making a company’s products and services relevant to the physical, mental, or emotional desires or needs of its customers. It’s about how empathy can be used to empower design thinking and creativity to implement people-centric solutions, allowing customers to understand how to solve their specific problems based on their needs and achieve results that exceed expectations. This is an important prospect for societal development, but a competitive advantage that has not yet been fully exploited. 

Facing fierce competition and a rapidly changing marketing environment, enterprises with multi-dimensional intelligences can become more hyper-connected and interdependent with the macro environment through dialogue with different stakeholders. Leaders should focus on cognitive differences, skills, abilities and wealth of ideas, and practice personalized intelligence to leverage business innovation and branding. Information analytics enables business management to improve customer relationships, optimize customer experience, increase business profitability, agility and people-centricity.

Information Synchronization: Information is the most time-consuming part of business management. Information analysis has become a powerful tool for building intimate and stronger relationships with a wider range of customers. Through data-based insights, businesses know that they are offering customers something that is both what they really want and what they are willing to pay for. Everything from how pricing impacts sales to referral business campaigns triggered by high customer satisfaction. The power of information is to enable companies to gain unprecedented real-time insight into the entire organization, look into the future, and make changes simultaneously. 

Business intelligence is a process that provides the tools necessary to build an "intelligent" organization. Data can be combined and separated almost at real time to gain a deeper understanding of the social environment. Often, uncoordinated business processes lead to severe information inconsistencies. Therefore, streamlined and standardized information management processes are a necessary prerequisite for providing effective information integration solutions and achieving information synchronization.

Potential development: Human society is at a turning point and requires major adjustments to the evolutionary path rooted in mindset level. Therefore, potential is an investment. High potentials demonstrate strategic insight to make a profound impact. In many cases, promising individuals or organizations do not achieve expected levels of performance. Businesses need to realign to ensure people are in the right place to solve the right problems. To accelerate progress, leaders need to be bold and innovative, create a structure that continuously meets the needs of the business, and take further steps to maximize the potential of human society.

The vision of operating a highly innovative organization or society is profound and requires continuous investment, training and development of employees and optimization of the workforce to meet the needs of rapid growth and continuous innovation. Therefore, on the path to building differentiated capabilities, strategic planning of potential portfolios provides a holistic view of multidimensional organizational system potential and strengthening Workforce deployment and development. 

Inclusion of contemporary society: High diversity and interdependence characterize the digital age. How should employees trust and feel confident in their digital journey? In this global climate, companies that are unwilling to truly embrace diversity are unable to unlock their collective potential. 

Although people have different goals, talents, and personalities, they must work together as a team to create the desired success and benefits. Empathetic communication, with inclusion principles and personalized work styles, can bridge the leadership and innovation gap and build a complementary team to consistently deliver high-performance results.

Resource optimization: A society that increases revenue and reduces expenditure refers to minimizing the use of non-renewable resources, reducing emissions and recycling waste, optimizing resource use, and maintaining and renewing our beautiful planet is a strategic discipline. 

However, in many less mature organizations, the leadership team puts energy efficiency and sustainability at very low priority. Energy renewing and sustainability are not integrated into existing key processes and performance management systems. Sometimes, there is a critical piece of information about environmental and social issues that is missing from most business operations.

Today's digital business environment is dynamic, complex and uncertain. There are always different complexities at different times or dimensions. Real social progress is achieved through vision, creativity, a wealth of knowledge, hard work that explores opportunities for growth and drives change. Change is “now” and transformation is a journey that requires greater strategic investment. It requires logical steps-functional changes in tools, culture, leadership, processes, or overall management capabilities. Personalized social progress is the general trend, and clearly-defined goals need to be achieved by promoting advanced ideas and agile actions.

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Innovationvalley

Ultimately, knowledge and insight can be abstracted into human wisdom that can be shared widely, and that makes all human beings humble enough to acknowledge the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns.

We are slowly but steadily moving from the age of industrialization to the age of insight-based personalization with the digital-rich innovation hubs. Knowledge is narrower and more specific, while wisdom is more extensive and abstract. Wisdom comes from life experience or the result of knowledge transcendence. Knowledge helps you figure out the “how” – practice. Wisdom guides you to pursue “why”—principles. 

Knowledge involves awareness and intelligence, while wisdom involves sound  judgment.  Wisdom is related to the ability to apply learned knowledge. Wisdom is the process of self-refinement from quantitative change to qualitative change through accumulation of experience, achieving unity and harmony. It’s important to figure out what causes smart people to make bad decisions so often. Learn from every experience, draw lessons, and refine the ability to evolve. If knowledge is concrete, wisdom is abstract, broad.

If knowledge is gained from learning, and insight is gained from relearning, then wisdom is a process of learning, reflection, and relearning. Wisdom is the full understanding of the world and its correct application.  There is a hidden and growing imbalance in the human mind, caused by the contrast between the pressure to constantly improve and the instinct to settle for the status quo.  Knowledge is often linear, but wisdom is multidimensional. More often than not, learning knowledge is concentrated on one track and needs to be done step by step; but wisdom is multi-dimensional, open, and cyclical. 

Wisdom is the function of knowing what you don’t know and remaining curious to learn more. Wisdom is the complete learning cycle: learning, doing and relearning. Wisdom is not knowledge; there cannot be wisdom without knowledge, but wisdom cannot replace knowledge. Wisdom consists primarily of applying knowledge and accumulating experience, but knowing when to let go of those experiences as you acquire new knowledge and tap into new areas of existing knowledge. Plus an open mind.

 Wisdom is a guide to purpose, progress, and making the world a better place. It is about “telling the difference” between what works and what doesn’t in the real world. Wisdom is the ability to gather reliable information from all sources and apply it to current or future challenges. Ultimately, knowledge and insight can be abstracted into human wisdom that can be shared widely, and that makes all human beings humble enough to acknowledge the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns.

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InnovationBreakthrough Conclusion: Build Breakthrough Innovation Competency

 Every organization is different, every innovation initiative is also unique, there is no “one size fits all” formula or practices to build breakthrough innovation competency.

With the increasing pace of changes and cutting-throat competitions, nowadays innovation can occur anywhere in the organization, and frankly, it has to occur in every aspect of the organization. To effectively respond to the digital dynamics, companies across vertical sectors must begin thinking about ways to build innovation competency, and broaden their ecosystems and revenue streams. 

In reality, true innovation always spurs certain disruptions, otherwise it is not innovation. Breakthrough innovations are very risky but on the other hand, you will get very great chances and opportunities for achieving leapfrog business results. To become true leaders, companies have to develop a learning organization and take a structural way to manage innovation, especially breakthrough innovations which are disruptive and will change their organizations in many fields. 

• Spot innovators and develop individuals’ creativity: The digital era upon us is about innovation. The variety of innovation research papers show that organizations that have earned a spot as the most innovative tend to have a larger proportion of innovative employees than organizations not on the lists have. Innovators present creatively disruptive traits, disrupt old ways, and inspire better ways to do things. 

How can organizations hire, retain, and recognize innovators - those energetic individuals with the types of unique characteristics, which can help organizations catalyze the culture of creativity and create an optimal environment for innovation? Being innovative is less about thinking alike, more about thinking differently. Being a digital innovator means you need to break down silo thinking, break through conventional wisdom and challenge the status quo. 

Spot innovators based on how they think, their intellectual curiosity, their abilities to connect the dots, and their learning agility. Innovators can ask open questions, identify blind spots or mind gaps, in order to identify the issues behind the scenes; they can shape a bigger box of thinking, think outside of the company, industry, or many other boundaries. 

In short, innovators obviously think differently, problem-solving is part of their DNA, whether it is in the invention, communication, marketing, or repurposing something already being there. Organizations should appreciate their innovators because they can lift the business out of the stagnation and leap the company toward the next level of the growth cycle.

• Develop the organizational level innovation competency: Due to the fact that innovating in today’s digital world has become increasingly complex in nature, often, organizations can no longer rely on a single individual or team to drive innovation. It is a strategic imperative to develop the organizational level innovation competency. Innovation can happen anywhere across the organization and its ecosystem. When looking at businesses or organizations, the most powerful innovation navigation system involves tapping the organization's ecosystem for collective perspectives and knitting all critical business elements such as people, process, and technology into differentiated innovation competency. 

To develop the organizational level innovation capability, businesses need to have a balanced portfolio of innovation projects, across the matrix of different types of “hard and soft” innovation (process, product/service, business model, communication, culture, leadership) and three degrees of innovation (incremental, substantial, breakthrough). Incremental innovation generally brings short-term value additions but breakthrough innovation differs from incremental innovation to be a "game changer." 

Every organization needs to develop tailored innovation principles, methodologies, or practices by leveraging effective technologies, tools or disciplines, apply them wisely with the expertise to really add value and develop the organizational level innovation competency.

• Build a highly innovative learning organization: Knowledge is the foundation of innovation. Learning organizations are comfortable with complexity, ambiguity, paradoxes and they have a penchant for candor. A learning organization is the one in which leaders encourage learning-doing as the iterative continuum; the majority of the employees at all levels are open to new ideas, experiment with new ways of doing things, learn from, instead of condemning or punishing mistakes or errors. Knowledge is shared instead of hoarding; it also involves those tasks which enable the transfer of learning from the back end to front end employees and vice versa. 

The business is in a healthy state of flow - information flow, idea flow, and mind flow. It is often true that unless there is a disruption, people very rarely move out of their comfort zone. In fact, growth is not possible unless people are willing to move out of their comfort zone. Practicing innovation and intrapreneurship is about creating the future via learning, experimenting, and discovering. 

Developing people’s innovativeness and the business systems’ innovation capability raise different learning issues that organizations must deal with smoothly. 'The “adaptive learning” must be joined by “generative learning,” which is the type of learning that enhances our capacity to create and develop collective innovation competency.

Innovation is a journey, not a destination. Every organization is different, every innovation initiative is also unique, there are no “one size fits all” formulas or practices to develop a learning organization and build breakthrough innovation competency. Digital leaders should weave an enriched innovation ecosystem which enables systematic innovation management, with critical components such as innovation leadership, culture, processes, tools, recognition systems measurements, and risk approach. It is full of science behind the magic of breakthrough innovation.

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InnovationBreakthrough Chapter V Innovation Risk Management

Innovation management assessment and measurement is both art and science. The perception will come from the usage you're doing with metrics.

Digital brings both unprecedented opportunities and risks to businesses today. Innovation becomes simply creating value by solving simple or complex problems. Innovation comes with a risk of failure; many say that innovation won’t happen without enough failures.

Every innovation pursuit has a risk in it. Therefore, it is important to set guidelines for monitoring innovation pulse and handling risks in a structural way. 

• Monitor the pulse of innovation risk management: The primary focus of innovation risk monitoring and management would be to identify and control risks that can be addressed through financing, market understanding, competitor analysis, identifying the space of opportunity, defining the scalability of the products/services, as well as what timescale to allow before making a go/no-go decision. 

Part of innovation is about not knowing how and for what you will use the budget; and some innovations need to be fed with resources while others get better by “starving” them. From a finance management perspective, consider what capital you are prepared to risk in making the innovation - never let this be so much that losing it will cripple your business if it cannot obtain the funding to continue to move towards fulfilling its core mission.

• Monitor innovation capacity and culture pulse: Monitoring the innovation pulse of your organization is to help the leadership team make an objective assessment of the business’s innovation capability; and read the organization’s cultural expression, with the goal to build the working environment in which creative thinking and experimenting are encouraged. 

Some companies use innovation quotients which integrate both numerical and qualitative information that relates to innovation success. Besides the hard numbers or numerical success indicators, it is important to bring more qualitative information that is crucial to understanding the health and well-being of the firm's innovation efforts. Always keep in mind, the goal of innovation assessment and measurement is to build innovation capacity and capability, not add another layer of complication.

• Monitor innovation performance management: The variety of innovation studies showed that the innovation success rate is not proportional to the amount of R&D investment. It means the more money or resources you pour into the innovation initiative do not guarantee higher ROI from innovation effort. Therefore, monitoring innovation management performance is critical to improving the innovation management success rate. 

Assuming an organization believes that metrics can lead to continuous improvement and improve innovation effectiveness, it won’t be just a matter of explicitly communicating the intention behind metrics, but a matter of guiding the leadership team via an in-depth understanding of the purpose of doing that and engaging on that, with the goal to build innovation capacity.

Only innovation can keep businesses cross sectors relevant. Risk is part of innovation, especially for breakthrough innovation. Risk management needs to be an integral component of innovation management. The success of innovation management is never an accident; it’s a holistic management process with an embedded risk management mechanism, and an iterative thought-out planning and execution continuum.

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Innovationbreakthrough Chapter IV: The Breakthrough Innovation Best Practices

Managing disruptive innovation demands insightful understanding, patience, persistence, and courage, among other things.

Innovation is the core activity of human evolution to change the environment for making collective progress. In the business setting, innovation is what differentiates the leader from followers. Often, innovation is disruptive and risky. It’s no surprise to know that many organizations avoid risks, the immediate pressure from shareholders or “keeping the lights on” bottom line mentality is making them look inward to make incremental improvement by optimizing what they know.

But from the long term perspective, the strategic concern is that they perhaps do not invest enough to craft a great innovation strategy with a harmonized vision about building enterprise innovation competency. The challenge is about how to proactively search for disruptive or breakthrough innovation to build long term business advantages?

• Deep listening: To disrupt, you must hear the whispers of customers, business contexts, inner worlds, or outside worlds. The disruptive innovation often evolves exploring the new market territories or attracting new customers by designing and delivering new products/services or new business models. Thus, one of the critical issues is to focus on end-user need gaps even by looking beyond your current products/services categories. People should be the center of innovation. 

One of the tests for whether it’s a disruptive innovation or not is about how significantly the value proposition it brings to the company, how impactful the problem it helps to solve, as well as how it makes any difference to dimensions that are valued by customers. Therefore, to disrupt, it’s important to practice deep listening skills, engage and empower customers for innovating, to gain insight and empathy. 

To implement innovation successfully, it’s also critical to build a strong team by maintaining their motivation and focus. Collectively, they have a good understanding and appreciation of the business processes, fully aware of the organizational structure and who is responsible for what - both infrastructure and application to truly deliver innovative products or services consistently.

• Objective attitude: It’s also important to have an objective attitude to understand innovation cycles thoroughly. Many disruptive opportunities are brought to life with new thinking on how to monetize them. A disruptive innovation is a breakthrough in the existing solutions, something that has a potential to disruptively challenge all existing solutions. At the early stage of the exploration, these innovations can be defined as offering an initially lower performance while at the same time bringing some new attributes to the market. Thus, it requires fresh thinking on how to monetize them. 

Although there is no “one size fits all” scenario, they almost always deliver some combination of the benefits of affordability, convenience, and ease-of-use compared to higher-performance existing solutions. To improve the innovation success rate, study success stories across the industrial sectors or global territories about disruptive innovation or gain “lessons learned” by avoiding others’ mistakes. After ideation, companies need to filter, prototype, and validate their ideas, and ultimately deliver innovative solutions. Also, be aware of the innovation cycle. A disruptive product over time weakens as it moves towards the eventual commodity status. So, companies have to keep searching for new opportunities to disrupt, rather than being disrupted.

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  Ecosystem viewpoint: Leverage ecosystem viewpoint and create a road-map for disruptive innovations. Digital dynamic enables companies to leverage their various environments or ecosystems, to chase innovation and accelerate performance. Variety, complexity, diversification, and collaboration are the very characteristics of the digital ecosystem. It’s great to create a roadmap for disruptive innovation because they are macro trends and patterns that give clues and there are unmet needs. 

Being digital fluent with an ecosystem perspective aids the management in understanding what’s relevant and what’s not. Try to digitally connect key assets or context to the resource-rich innovation hubs and clusters across enterprise ecosystems. In doing so, you can create a shared context for learning and co-creating. That, in turn, will further fuel broader collaboration in generating fresh ideas. How successfully the organization can manage “disruptive ideas” and deliver innovative products or services depends on how those ideas are recognized, filtered and dealt with. Innovation leaders should fill their innovation toolbox with tailored frameworks, processes, technologies, various problem-solving tools, and metrics to evaluate innovation performance. Structural innovation management requires laying out different thought processes, structures, or cultures for bringing ideas into full fruity.

Managing disruptive innovation demands insightful understanding, patience, persistence, and courage, among other things. It’s important to set a good innovation agenda and start new conversations that galvanize inspiration and gain traction on a powerful theme of business renewal and growth.

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