Leading Innovation

Partha Momidi, Deputy Chief Information Officer, Guilford County, NC.

Partha Momidi, Deputy Chief Information Officer, Guilford County, NC.

Leading Innovation - Introduction

Innovation is essential for any organization to be successful on a short and long-term basis. This is a multi-part article series to talk about basics of innovation, discussing a framework to lead innovation in an organization and how to build and sustain an innovative culture within the organization.

The article series covers leading innovation in organizations that focus heavily on delivering services as well as organizations that build products or conduct research in creating new cutting-edge artifacts in solving problems that were never addressed before.

We focus on two types of organizations. The first type are the ones who build or create products (both hard, soft products, research) and build their entire business model around them, you can relate any typical commercial organization belonging to this category. We call these “product centric”. The second type of organization focuses on service delivery where the entire focus is on delivering value services to its end users, most of the health care, public sector / government etc. fall in this category. We call these second type “service centric” organizations. The list of types of organizations can be a long list and the domains that fall under each type can be lengthy too, so for this article series, we will group together organizations in the above two types. While most innovation management steps can be common across both organization types, there may be some areas that service centric organizations can ignore and still be very successful in managing and leading the innovation efforts within. The innovation management of the product centric organizations will have a larger footprint to cover and manage overall, especially if they want to play in the cutting-edge layer of the industries that they are engaged in.

“Innovation is important for continued growth and expansion, delivering better customer satisfaction, loyalty, delight, operational efficiency, attracting talent and retention, sustaining with changing market dynamics, industry trends, and ever-increasing complex regulations.”

Organizations need to focus on innovation due to several important factors. In “product centric” organizations / companies, the competitive advantage of the organization is dependent on how innovative its product and service offerings are when compared to its competitors in the marketplace.

To stay relevant in the fast-paced market, companies need to continue focus on innovation throughout their value chain without which they will fade away slowly and be overshadowed by their competitors. Innovation is also important for continued growth and expansion, delivering better customer satisfaction, loyalty, delight, operational efficiency, attracting talent and retaining, sustaining with changing market dynamics, industry trends, and ever-increasing complex regulations. Innovation can also enhance the reputation of the organization, attract investors, build a solid sticky customer base, and long-term success in positioning the organization for sustained success over time. The above factors are true for any product centric organization that is trying to create products and deliver services on top of them and win market share. For “service centric” organizations that focus on delivering value to their end users using quality services, innovation needs to be embedded into the total service delivery, service optimization, quality management, and continuous improvement.

In this article series, we will discuss basic concepts of innovation, some common industry innovation management frameworks, define what steps the organization can take to build an innovative culture, manage, and sustain it