Avoid Innovation Paralysis – Why all Companies Can and Must Embrace Change

    Someone once told me this: “Innovation is like an apparition of the Virgin Mary: one person saw her, but everyone talks about it.” Although funny, the quote aptly captures an attitude towards innovation that exists in many companies today. Innovation – and the skills that enable it – are sometimes considered as mystical gifts, preserved for the chosen few. In other cases, innovation is feared, because it involves unregulated processes, risk taking and investments with unpredictable outcomes.

Innovation. The word is tossed around carelessly, and is repeatedly illustrated with the same few business cases. Some of the usual suspects include autonomous transport (Google, Tesla), wearable tech (Apple) and of course … the sharing economy (Uber, Airbnb).

Innovation is a business discipline

A lot of business leaders know they want innovation, yet they struggle to define what it actually means to them. Simply put, innovation is about making changes that add business value, in terms of either revenue growth or increased operational efficiency. This value can be created in four ways:

1. introducing new products;
2. optimizing operational processes;

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A Strategy that Requires Innovation

    Every executive knows that their teams should be more nimble, should be operating at a higher speed, and should be innovating. But these are all discrete capabilities, not necessarily in service to any greater strategy, and in fact much of what passes for strategy doesn’t understand how to take advantage of these capabilities. In this article, the authors describe the Maneuver Strategy from the new book, Outmaneuver. This strategy relies on innovation to achieve its goals, rather than accommodating innovation when it must.

For at least a decade, pundits and experts have expounded on the need to innovate.  Corporations need innovation, we say, for a number of reasons.  The pace of change is clearly accelerating.  The average lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 has been cut in half over the last twenty years.  Customer expectations are changing rapidly.  New technologies emerge constantly.  These reasons drive the need for more innovation.  But what’s often missing is the rationale and focus.

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How Innovation and Authenticity Complement Each Other in a Corporate Environment

Authenticity and innovation are two of today’s biggest corporate buzzwords. They are often considered as separate values, but in reality they have much in common and in this article we will examine the areas of overlap and potential leverage benefits.

Neither of these terms have the same definition from company to company, or even amongst individuals. For the purpose of this article we will use the following definitions:

• Innovation is the process of translating an idea or invention into a good or service that creates value or for which customers will pay. (reference BusinessDictionary.com).
• Authenticity is the quality of being real or true, and is best understood as a social construction that has been put into place to achieve a particular aim. (Cambridge Dictionary online and Library Trends (Vol.56, No. 1)

With that out of the way, let’s examine ways in which authenticity leverages and supports innovation, and vice-versa. Some examples include:

1. Authenticity and Design Thinking

Without an authentic approach it is difficult to identify those key pain points that drive the development of truly innovative ideas.

These days’ innovation within a corporate setting is synonymous with Design Thinking (DT) approaches. The fact is that DT requires a genuine understanding and appreciation of not only what is possible, but what is most beneficial from a client / end user perspective.

2. Roles in innovation

People often think that being innovative is a singular focus on coming up with the lightbulb idea that will change everything. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. The reality is that innovation requires a range of skills and abilities, and few people possess all aspects (Suzan Briganti at Totem writes about this). Accordingly, it is important for innovators to recognize their true, specific skills in the context of identifying, selecting and executing new ideas.

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How Innovation Develops Among Individuals in Niche Social Networks

In the current digital arena, social networks have touched the lives of almost every human being on earth, allowing us to share life's novelties with friends and loved ones. However, social networks are not restricted to sharing and commenting on pictures, but giving rise to innovation among individuals to help make our world a better place.

Social networks in the form of crowdfunding sites allow individuals to give wings to their innovative ideas for a new startup. Many online communities have also been set up to find innovative solutions for existing challenges such as: global warming, energy consumption, agriculture, space science, etc.

What kind of social networks are driving innovation?

• Online project management tools from tech ventures such as FindNerd provide an android developer forumwhere tech people ideate and resolve queries as quickly as possible
• Someone with a brilliant, innovative idea for a new mobile or web app can learn app development through social networks

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How to Do Business Model Innovation for the Established Firm

This article provides a systematic framework for helping executives of large, established organizations identify opportunities for business model innovation and organize themselves to pursue these opportunities. While also applicable to start-ups, this article focuses primarily on how to define, challenge, and revamp the business model of an existing business or organization.

In nearly every industry tried and tested business models are coming under attack at an unprecedented rate:Pharmaceutical companies are searching for alternatives to the blockbuster model. Banks are looking for innovative ideas to make up for lost fees and revenues due to new regulations. A drop in advertising revenues and circulation pushes newspapers towards new sources of income. Traditional brick and mortar bookstores are losing out to online competitors that are not encumbered by pricey real estate. Software providers are being threatened by cloud computing. The common root cause at the heart of the problem:a once successful business models.

“Changing a business model of an established organization is difficult – the gravitational pull of the existing business is hard to overcome.”

What is a business model, anyway?

A business model describes the logic behind how an organization communicates, creates, and captures value. Henry Chesbrough in his book “Open Innovation” suggests that a business model has six functions:

• Articulate the value proposition – the value created for users by the offering based on the technology.
• Identify a market segment – the users to whom the technology is useful and the purpose for which it will be used.

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Getting Innovation to Scale – Emergence (part 1 of 3)

    Through scaling, smart movers can quickly build substantial market shares – or define entirely new markets. To help understand scaling we have divided it into three main areas: Emergence, Networks and Waves. This article is on Emergence, the first in a series of three.

We operate in business and societal environments that are complex, dynamic, and uncertain. This environment provides new challenges and at the same time great opportunities through scaling – which we have defined as the successful introduction of innovations that spread rapidly in non-linear fashion, seemingly self-propelled and with relatively little effort, resulting in an outsized impact.

Our research draws on scientific approaches such as Complexity Theory, Behavioral Economicsand Systems Theory.  We have divided the topic into three main areas: Emergence, Networks, and Waves. Within these three areas, we have identified different tactics for leaders to benefit from scaling. We call these scaling frames.

• Emergence. As collective behavior, this frame refers to the phenomenon of patterns becoming apparent in complex systems of interacting agents. Innovation leadership can look to make use of emergent collective behavior by designing openness into a system and designing rules for interaction, which allow successful behavior to surface and spread. We have distinguished 13 separate tactics -or scaling frames- that we have clustered under Emergence.
• Networks. Innovation leadership can take advantage of the properties of networks, the structures and technology supporting networks, and the social conditioning that exists with network members to scale their innovations. We have identified six distinct network frames.

Here is not the end….To view the full Article about Getting Innovation to Scale – Emergence (part 1 of 3) visit Innovation Management. Also visit our various programs of Online Learning Innovation Programs and also get updated with our latest Articles.

25 Steps to Jump-Start your Innovation Journey

We’ve covered some essential ground to help you prepare your innovation journey, and now it’s time to put these concepts into action. The innovation formula addresses the very specific tasks that have to be accomplished for innovation to emerge from your organization not only as a matter of luck or at random, but through a concentrated effort that results in sustained innovation performance. Here you will find the Taking Action steps along with 25 additional suggestions that we hope will help you to think and plan creatively and productively about how to make innovation a reality in your organization.

• Change and complexity, the external world that seems to be different nearly every day.
• Risk and the need to come up with great ideas, and to balance potential rewards with the risks that come with striving to attain them.
• Speed, the imperative to go fast because the external world isn’t waiting around for you or your organization, and your competitors would be happy to seize your market share and make it their own.
• Engagement, because it takes the observations, expertise, and insights of many people working effectively together to come up with great ideas, and then transform them into working solutions to problems that your customers really do want to solve.
• Leadership, because no innovations happen without courage, commitment, support, and often resources, and these are elements that you, as leader, must provide in highly visible and emphatic ways.
• And then tools, which can make the path much easier and faster even if they’re not fancy.
  

Your Innovation Team

This will be a dynamic group of people from many different backgrounds who have vital roles to play in support of your firm’s innovation management objectives. Without knowing the specifics of your situation, your organization, and the unique challenges you’re facing, please consider the following as a suggestion and a general set of jobs or roles that are useful to the successful pursuit of innovation in a small organization, that is, your company.

Complexity and Change: The Strategy Manager

We began the discussion of your innovation needs, requirements, and opportunities by exploring the driving forces of change that are shaping the world of tomorrow. We talked about technology, science, culture, the population, and climate change, and these broad trends as well as some that may be specific to your industry or your organization present a continually changing panorama that you need to be paying close attention to, for there’s no telling when an external change will lead to a specific requirement or challenge for you.

Getting Started

As you recruit the best people you can find to participate on your innovation team, and work to engage with them as your teammates, colleagues, and fellow travelers on the innovation journey, one of the most important things to remember is that innovation is driven by divergent thinking, which we also know as lateral thinking, and as a leader you must specifically encourage, promote, and indeed insist on the necessity of divergent thinking across all aspects of the work, from the design and management of your innovation efforts, to the conduct of the many ongoing innovation projects.

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