Innovation Excellence

When strategy defines a direction and innovation defines the exciting unknown, how can you combine the two? Innovation capability enables organizations to generate, identify, assess and realize new products, services and processes facilitated or driven by digital technologies and management practices. It's the seed of competitive advantage. Without innovation, efforts at digital business transformation are likely to lead to rather an inspiring and unprofitable outcomes. My name is Rob Lewellyn and as you know, companies need people with the right capabilities to manage and lead transformation. As you know, orchestrating successful transformation isn't that easy. And I mean innovative transformation, which creates a new future without the constraints of the past. Which is why I hope that what I share in this episode will help you get better equipped to perform at your best as a manager, leader or consultant. If you want to learn more, go.

To studythrive.com Innovation is about survival and is widely recognized as an important driver of economic growth. But believing in innovation is not enough. Neither is using antiquated innovation techniques effective in today's world of rapid change, digital technologies and ever increasing variables. Companies that lack commitment to innovation and have no innovation competence, unsurprisingly, have limited innovation innovation capability. They expect staff who are not innovation experts to drive innovation excellence. Innovation requires capability so the process can be actively managed. But many leaders seem content with a widening gap between where their innovation capability is now and where it needs to be. Others are not even aware that a gap might exist, or they believe that antiquated innovation methods are still effective. And there are other executives who love to evangelize their company's innovative spirit, but invest little, if anything, into actually becoming good at innovation. This leaves the company's innovation efforts to be rather uninspiring and insufficient for effective digital business transformation. When strategy defines a direction and innovation defines the exciting unknown, how can you combine the two? And does your team have the right innovation capabilities, or do they just feel it can be innovative because it's fun? Innovation capability enables organizations to generate, identify, assess and realize new products, services and processes facilitated or driven by digital technologies and management practices. It's the seed of competitive advantage. Without innovation, efforts at digital business transformation are likely to lead to uninspiring attempts to keep doing the same things, but with new technology, which might cut some operational costs, but it'll create nothing innovative or transformational. This is why innovation is such an essential component of digital business transformation. It needs to live at the heart of innovation. Every company its success is clear when you look at some of the greatest companies in the world, whether they're vast in scale like DHL or comparatively small and new, like Uber. Innovation needs to help meet and exceed the expectations of customers, whether they are customers in the market or within the organization. Innovation needs to deliver value to those customers and disrupt what was on offer to them in the past, even making it redundant and irrelevant in the face of what innovation creates. You need to innovatively digitize internal operations to do things better, faster and cheaper, empower your workforce with digital tools and find new ways to engage customers and partners and bring new products and services to market. But more fundamentally, the creation of new digital business models calls for innovation of the higher standards if it's to help shape the way in which your company makes money in the digital economy. Much has been written on innovation and there are various schools of thought despite the different approaches, and everyone will have their favorites. Regardless of which methods you use, what's important is that you embrace the principle of innovation. There are many studies revealing to all of us that most leaders know what innovation is and that it's important. But knowing the importance of innovation and taking appropriate action don't line up as they should. And less than 10% of companies actually identify themselves as being good at innovation. If that's the case, what hope does the other 90% have of creating a great future for their company? And why are the leaders of the 90% allowing their companies to be in such an unacceptable place? Let's consider your fundamental innovation approaches. To describe design thinking, I'll use the words of Tim Brown of ideo. He says that design thinking involves a human centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success. Then there's open innovation, which is where companies use both internal and external ideas to advance technology with a willingness to consider both internal and external paths to commercialize the company's offerings. Then it's customer co creation, which enables new products and services to be enhanced through an active creative and social collaboration process between companies and customers, superseding the shumperten model where the lone entrepreneur would bring innovations to market. Then there's innovation scouting, which sees specialists tasked with identifying new opportunities for partnership, co development, licensing or acquisition. Then there's the business model innovation, which is now being recognized by many as being priority and more important than product innovation because this is the essence of what can gain and maintain competitive advantage. Research has shown us that leading innovators have grown at a faster rate than those companies that are least innovative, so innovation capabilities are key to what degree an organization can successfully innovate with digital technologies. I strongly suggest you take a look at the free design thinking material and free 90 minute course that they offer at www.dschool.stanford.edu. while most companies talk about innovation, only the minority are really prepared to take a good hard look at their capability. Innovate, understand the areas they need to improve upon and proactively nurture the capabilities that gives rise to innovative business transformation and competitive advantage. So if you know you need to improve innovation in your company, what do you do? Well, you need to assess the maturity of your current level of innovation capability. Understand the gaps, then fill them. You need to nurture a culture of innovation. Innovation needs to be encouraged to flourish throughout the company and not be confined to meetings. Then you need to agree upon an innovation process model so that everyone is singing from the same song sheet. You need to break down silos. The best innovation happens when people from other areas of the business see things from a different perspective. So get them involved. Focus on solving problems and creating value. I've already mentioned design thinking, but regardless of the approach you use, the goal should be to generate value. Ultimately, you need to develop and align leadership, management practices, talent and the right processes to transform innovation from an unpredictable activity into a disciplined process and finally, taking advantage of existing digital use cases that can provide inspiration about how digital technologies can help during the innovation process.

If you want to take your transformation capabilities and credentials to the next level, go to studythrive.com.