According to the consultancy Gartner Inc., companies that can successfully manage and maintain innovation within the workplace can increase revenue, improve operational effectiveness, and pursue new business models.
Common tools or strategies used to elicit this creativity from employees include brainstorming, virtual prototyping, product lifecycle management, idea management, product line planning, portfolio management and more.
Innovation processes often fall into two categories: "pushed" or "pulled." A pushed process is when a company has access to existing or emerging technologies and tries to find a profitable application for it. A pulled process is when the company focuses on areas where the customers' needs are not met and a solution is found.
An important aspect of keeping innovation, especially IT innovation, alive within a company is cultivating and maintaining an innovative culture.
One type of innovation culture is a formulaic innovation culture. A formulaic innovation management style instills a vision throughout the workplace and continually supports that vision through operational processes that enable employees to take measured risks. New ideas are encouraged, can come from anyone within the company and, when good ideas do surface, that idea is supported through one of the company's time-tested processes. The possible drawbacks to this type of business innovation management is that companies can begin to value the system over the breakthroughs, and the culture within the organization can become complacent.
Another type of innovation culture is an entrepreneurial innovation culture. This type of innovation culture is rare and usually features, especially early on in the company's maturity, a single innovator or leader. Steve Jobs, the cofounder of Apple Inc. was an example of the single leader inspired innovation culture, as is Mark Zuckerberg, chairman and CEO of Facebook. These types of companies are usually willing to take risks that most companies would not. These types of companies strive for major disruption rather than incremental growth and they use emerging and disruptive technologies to change how a certain product or service is used. One possible drawback is that the company can rely too heavily on the innovative leader.
Gartner's recommendation to IT leaders interested in launching an innovation management program is to follow a disciplined approach. Here are five steps Gartner recommends IT leaders and their companies take to develop an innovation management program:
- Strategize and plan: Settle on an agreement of the vision for the initiative that is also in line with business goals. Then establish the resources and budget, and integrate the vision with IT and business plans.
- Develop governance: Establish a process for making decisions. This includes identifying and engaging stakeholders, agreeing on who is in charge and what the flow for decision making is, and also having feedback mechanisms in place.
- Drive change management: Have systems by which people can communicate and socialize via multiple channels; get buy-in from stakeholders at all levels; and assess which open innovation initiatives and cultural shifts will help the company optimize contributions to innovation.
- Execute: Make sure to draw from a wide range of sources to generate ideas for innovations that will transform the business, align the initiatives with business goals, and then update and drive new elements of the initiatives in response to changing business requirements.
- Measure and improve: Once the innovative initiative is in place, monitor and measure how it has affected business outcomes. It is also important to seek feedback from stakeholders and to continue to study innovation best practices and case studies from other organizations. Also make sure to continually drive improvements through process changes and upgrades.
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