Breakthrough growth cannot be left to eureka moments. Instead a bold corporate strategy needs to be put in place, for such innovations to crystalize. Resources need be mobilized to scale and tough choices need to be made. There may be several themes towards this innovation. The most effective is one zealously guards the core. Another fruitful mechanism is when diversification and adjacencies are worked out towards. One may also opt for ecosystem innovation. Less effective is incremental innovation, as it is only step wise. New business models are a challenge, but of course one that several businesses take up. In order to step up towards such models, companies need to take in to account the changing customer needs and preferences. Business analytics tools may then be applied so one may predict this market size. New ways also need to be found out, to engage this customer. The delivery of core innovation, too need tweaking over time. This will happen when the brand improves the efficiency and flexibility of the processes.

Source:https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/the-innovation-commitment

Uploaded Date:06 January 2020

Contrary to the popular perception, incubating innovations is more than merely dependent upon having a fat business research and development budget. There are three distinct capabilities embedded in it. These are popularly considered as the DIA or Discovery, Incubation and Acceleration. One needs to think of the bigger picture, before embarking upon any innovation journey. Capacity building too needs to be internally ensured so the team can work towards the incubation and acceleration stages. Thorough corporate training needs to be facilitated in order to develop this internal capacity. It has been widely understood, that improved innovation efforts, largely tend to deliver positive impact for the practicing company over a sustained period of time.

Source:https://hbr.org/2019/12/real-innovation-requires-more-than-an-rd-budget?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_campaign=dailyalert_activesubs&utm_content=signinnudge&referral=00563&deliveryName=DM60254

Uploaded Date:06 January 2020

When working on world- changing innovations, the truly smart companies are known to focus on a few set of skills in particular. These are the focus on the new book The Wise Company, written by HirotakaTekuchi. The first thing to do is to judge goodness, for the entire society and not just the company involved in. One needs to also rely on intuition to understand the deeper meaning around events, things and even people. Formal and informal shared content needs to be created, to use human interactions as the force to construct new meaning. Metaphors and stories will also help all in better understanding of the corporate strategy. People with conflicting goals need to be brought together by all means, to spur them on to some action. And finally, the right corporate training needs to be applied on the front- line workers, through mentoring and apprenticeships, so they may develop some work- related practical wisdom.

Source:https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6-skills-that-wise-companies-harness-for-world-changing-innovation

Uploaded Date:27 December 2019

To state an extreme example of innovation, one need not look any further than booking.com. It is the world’s largest online accommodations platform but at the same time its landing pages number in to the quadrillions, which is millions of billions. This has been explained in detail in the upcoming book titled as Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments, written by Stefan Thomke. The likes of Netflix, Amazon and Microsoft have also been named as stellar examples. One of the challenges towards innovation is that whenever something is too novel, there isn’t enough data warehousing done, to support the claims. That is why the companies are not too sure on how to proceed ahead with these ideas. A certain discipline is then needed to crack the code. There exist three major steps in this. The first one is about acquiring the right insights. Next, one needs to develop a certain hypothesis, around which the business intelligence captured, may be measured against. After this the results are collated. To scale up too, there exist five steps, beginning with creating an awareness. Then, the team needs to be addressed so they believe in the project. A commitment has to be pledged form one and all. Diffusion is up next, followed lastly, by a sense of embeddedness.

Source:https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/creating-the-experimentation-organization

Uploaded Date:27 December 2019

Business innovation need not always be disruptive. There is also the nondisruptive type. In fact, the latter works as an alternative to growth. The rise of Uber’s services, or the decline and ultimate death of Kodak’s near complete market dominance, are examples of the former. Such innovation benefits millions of people. The effects are far reaching, and quite often global. The problem is that because of a few such stray cases, corporate leaders have been made to believe that this is the only form of innovation worth chasing. But in reality, the nondisruptive model leverages the existing formula, but reinvents it for a different market, or segment. The existing frameworks do not get completely ripped off, but merely remodeled.

Source:https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/nondisruptive-creation-rethinking-innovation-and-growth/

Uploaded Date:23 December 2019

In spite of often assembling a top- notch team to work on executing business innovations, drives may fail. This is usually due to the product or function organizational structure not being rightly aligned. A new book has been launched talking about this situation. It is titled as Leading Transformation: How to Take Charge of Your Company’s Future, written by a professor at INSEAD, who specializes in corporate strategy, along with two others, who are from a business background. At time when any team is taking on some breakthrough initiative, there are three unique characteristics that determine the course of final outcome. One is the negative capability. This is about how well any company manages uncertainty. There are also chaos pilots. This is all about executing and leading in areas one isn’t fully comfortable in. The third key characteristic is to go for a combine of divergent thinking, influential communication and convergent action.

Source:https://hbr.org/2018/11/if-your-innovation-effort-isnt-working-look-at-whos-on-the-team?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=hbr&utm_medium=social

Uploaded Date:21 December 2019

A lot of studies have pointed out to how managers consider compliance regulations or similar restriction with resources as the main hurdles to properly developing business innovations. Common wisdom would have it that all constraints be removed. This belief though is fraught with inconsistencies. A lot of inventions and innovations have in fact prospered, when there were certain limitations. GE for example got successful with several of their developments, not in spite, but because of the limitations. Thus, managers must make use of constraints to the best of their abilities. They could limit inputs such as human capital, cash, time, material and funds. They could even enforce specific processes. Output requirements may also be set in stone. Overdoing of these too wouldn’t be beneficial as that would curb individual freedom to experiment. Thus, flexible constraints could help in creating the ideal innovation climate.

Source:https://hbr.org/2019/11/why-constraints-are-good-for-innovation

Uploaded Date:21 December 2019