To develop innovation as the differentiated competency, companies must go beyond experimenting innovation and commit to taking a systematic scenario to explore innovation in its digital ecosystem for achieving high-value business results.
In the “VUCA’ digital new normal with the exponential growth of information, knowledge is only clicks away. The problem often leads to opportunities to innovate because they challenge us to address something that is not working before.
Innovation & constraints: Creativity is the most desired professional competency. Innovation is the light every organization is pursuing. The individual’s “thinking box” is a mental construct made up of personal and environmental components that one operates within. People are constrained by such a little thinking box with which they are familiar. People set constraints that limit them from unleashing their full potential: there are constraints in an organization that seems to hold the business back from a holistic strategy. Indeed, such constraints may become the very reasons why organizations need to craft their strategy.
Having constraints provides guidelines to build a creative environment to nurture and incubate great ideas, and access the maximum number of potentially good ideas for developing innovative products, services, business models and solutions. Highly innovative organization leverages innovation strategy as an effective constraint to stay focused on building the innovation capacity of the business and unlocks a new market or revenue stream. Business architecture can be a useful innovation management framework, having the tough axis which describes strategic “constraints,” allowing the management to manage innovation in a structured way and improve innovation effectiveness.
Innovation & alternatives: One of the biggest challenges in this complex digital world with high velocity and uncertainty is the fact that we need different perspectives, different knowledge, and different ways to solve many existing and emerging business problems. With the breakdown of physical barriers and blurred digital territories; unprecedented digital convenience brought by abundant information and lightweight technologies, people now enjoy alternative ways to learn, work or shop. They can tailor their own needs to select the alternative option for them. They should become more open to diverse viewpoints, connect the dots in the interdisciplinary domains, look for alternative ways to do things, and take the unique path to digitize and innovate.
To build an innovative organization, it’s important to ask tough questions, channel energy, enthusiasm, and ideas, to not only come up with one solution to the old or new business problem, but multiple solutions and manage innovation in a structural way. Continue looking at new ways to analyze “problems”: identify and prioritize alternative solutions, take a structural way to make inquiries. Regardless of which industry or organization you are in, being an innovative leader will need to master the art of creating unique, differentiating business solutions. The management should always explore the alternative organizational structures, alternative recruiting pipelines, alternative communication channels, alternative management approach, and alternative ways to engage employees or delight customers.
Innovation & reconfiguration: Innovation is a differentiated business competency. Capabilities oftentimes include dependencies, one is part of another, or depends on another. The business management can reconfigure different pieces of components to shape differentiated innovation capabilities. One of the building blocks of dynamic innovation capability are processes for coordination, integration, reconfiguration and paths to a clarified vision. If the underlying structures and processes are dynamic and flexible, the innovation capabilities can be reconfigured dynamically without reinventing the wheel.
The right set of scalable, coherent, and impactful capabilities directly contribute to the business maturity. Capability matters as it directly decides which levels of complexity you can handle either from decision-making or problem-solving perspective. Innovation capability is dynamic, it’s the ability to reconfigure your organization in this way that has the effect of increasing its “variety” – to match variety in the environment, generating and managing ideas to achieve commercial values. It is important to look at dynamic innovation capability from a quite different and systemic perspective, disentangle dynamic capabilities in three clusters of processes and managerial orchestration activities: sensing, seizing and continued renewal.
To develop innovation as the differentiated competency, companies must go beyond experimenting innovation and commit to taking a systematic scenario to explore innovation in its digital ecosystem for achieving high-value business results. From an innovation management perspective, it’s important to ensure the right people with creative abilities have been assigned to the right role for building highly innovative teams to deliver innovation continually.
