Recommendation For Enterprise Leaders To Encourage Innovation

Among the main lessons learned during the pandemic is that innovation is important in ensuring organizational resilience, specifically if its goal is longevity. However, despite the ability to introduce new services, products and business models on a scaled and regular basis proving critical, a lot of challenges accompany it. The main reason for innovation for enterprises is to encourage the continuous growth of an enterprise by offering better and new products.

In order to excel in innovation, just like other functions in a business, requires intense planning and investment. It requires good management too. Innovation excellence models determined by the character and context of an organization prove to be an effective tool in objectively understanding the significance of innovation.

Universally, the index of Global Innovation is a common metric used to measure a company's innovation abilities. Surprisingly, there is a science for measuring innovation. Below are the essential components every enterprise should follow in order to estimate its innovativeness.

Attention and Investments

To ensure effectiveness in innovation, the innovation agenda of any enterprise needs to be in strategic alignment with the organization's charter with designated responsible ownership in a centralized corporate function or decentralized embedment in business units. An executive commitment, differentiated portfolio approach, pre-planned budget investments, and reliable resource allocation are essential if an organization is targeting consistency and commitment to innovation.

Similar Processes

A well-designed and wide set of operations containing clear articulation is important to guarantee smooth operation and scalability in innovation, moreover in federated, large and heterogeneous establishments. These processes comprise knowledge and management of risk, lifecycle management, forecasting, trend spotting, disciplined governance and partnership management. There should be a clear key performance indicator that monitors innovation.

The Culture Within an Organization

A company needs a systematic development of cultures for innovation among people and best-practice blueprints. Adopting such a culture aids in locating the best balance between focus and freedom, return and risk, contribution and creativity, and efficacy and entrepreneurship. In business, innovation comes with the burden of ensuring recurrent positive outcomes. Intentional bottom-up contributions to share, encourage and celebrate free thinkers and innovators in combination with top-down mentoring and attention can promote the culture of innovation.

Impact Calibration

Innovation entails the creation of value through creative and smart exploitation of ideas and interventions that are supported by an external ecosystem. Therefore, the final impact and outcomes should draw a clear line along the innovation funnel. They include intellectual capital, measuring and monitoring the creation capability, customer satisfaction, disruption of the market, business performance, and sustainability via mixing of processes, tools, and metrics. Furthermore, developing a culture of comparing innovations depending on process, culture, capability and performance across and within the company may be beneficial.