Innovation management needs to be able to enforce integrative diversity by breaking down silos, handling innovation management paradoxes and dealing with innovation dilemmas strategically.
Due to abundant knowledge, increasing pace of changes, blurred territories, and hyperconnectivity, innovation can happen anywhere across the organization and its ecosystem. However, it has a very low success rate; every organization has a tolerance for the variance which, when exceeded, produces a failure scenario.
Innovation variance: A very simple way initially to improve innovation in almost any organization is to simply broaden the audience, and its diversity for solving challenges. Variance by strengths, personality, function, industry experience, stakeholder (customers, suppliers, resellers/retailers, regulators, etc.) allow for superior need discovery, business model creation, assessment, and validation. Innovation is the most needed change. You have to bring it back to the fact that resistance to change has root causes in fear-driven by evolutions.
When someone is resisting innovation; it is usually because one or more of the elements is missing for them. Look at the issues from their perspective. If you stagnate, you don’t grow and your company doesn’t grow. For growth to happen, the whole team must all be on board to harness innovation. The culture of innovation needs to be cultivated intentionally, and change has to be anchored in and set in movement by all parties.
Variance in the quality of generated ideas: Individually, to become innovative, people need to keep learning agile, build variety of experience, play different personas in understanding issues from different angles in order to come up with alternative ways to do things. There are high-quality traits of professionalism such as positive mentality and attitude, fair judgment. At the organizational level, if the company does not understand the failure, then there will be no innovation. Be open-minded to ensure ideas were heard, not slapped down. The balance is achieved via inspiring freedom and enforcing discipline; the business harmony is based on continuous idea-sharing and constructive criticism to foster a culture of innovation.
In reality, many people are inherently cynical about innovation or change, many doubt there are effective means to accomplish them. To achieve innovation excellence, either at the individual or organizational level, it’s great to have “enthusiasm,” and courage, based on the inner strength that is able to increase the quality of innovation performance. From an innovation management perspective, ensure there are abundance of ideas flowing into pipelines and get processed smoothly. There is more flow of creative ideas, the more is happening, the pie gets bigger. Bottlenecks should be broken down, all processes should be observed, controlled and optimized holistically.
Information and process variance: Nowadays there isn’t really much of an enterprise without the massive oceans of information that flow through the enterprise at any given split second. Water is tough, there’s turmoil in the information sea. Information variance and many analytical factors have a major influence on the fine parts of a process refinement. Information quality, the frequency of occurrence, process cohesiveness directly impact innovation effectiveness.
Information and processes are two sides of innovation management. In some incremental innovation scenarios, data has a significant role in defining the process and data comes first. A good process includes an understanding of value, function, data, responsibility, and control flow. In management practices, integral information/process management directly impacts the maturity of innovation management; the process refinement is often based on an iterative cycle of designing, modeling, and optimizing. As long as you have the freedom to design what you want to do, generate novel ideas. Then, you design the process, define the data you need along the way to implement them smoothly.
In reality, innovation fails because many organizations lack a cohesive strategy or a systematic approach to handle variance, manage both opportunities and risks in a structural way. Innovation management needs to be able to enforce integrative diversity by breaking down silos, handling innovation management paradoxes and dealing with innovation dilemmas strategically.
