Leading Innovation

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

Leading Innovation–Basics

This is the second part of the “Leading Innovation” article series.  Last month, we covered the introduction of this topic and discussed why “innovation” is so important for any organization.  This second part of the article series tries to bring the basics of innovation to the readers.  Before we go deep into the innovation concepts, lets cover some basics on what exactly innovation means at a foundation level. Innovation can have several definitions depending on who you ask and it is sometimes tricky to quickly explain what innovation really means for an organization. Some call it “coming up with new solutions” and some “identifying new needs that were never addressed” or a combination of “a new solution and a need together”. All these definitions are true in various contexts. 

The origin of the “nova” keyword which is part of the Innovation is “new” in latin. So keeping that in mind, we could say that Innovation can be clearly defined as either “Identifying a new solution for an existing need” OR “Identifying a new need and solving it using an existing or new solution”. Innovation in an organization can be derived from combinations of these two scenarios. In any size organization, there are several “processes” or “solutions” that are in place to address one or several “needs” of their end customers. The value delivery of any organization is solely dependent on addressing its customer “needs” with efficient “solutions” that it can come up with. Refer to the Picture (1) below.

The Organization boundary covers the entire circumference of any type of organization or a group within an organization delivering value to its customers either internal or external to its organization. On the “solutions” side, there are existing solutions that the organization is already implementing/using and new innovative solutions that the organization has not figured out yet in addressing the needs of its customers. At the same time on the “needs” side, it has identified the “existing needs” which are addressed, but there are “new needs” that it has not yet identified or refine or fine tune an existing need. You can see from Picture(1) that there are several combinations of needs plus solutions that can be put together, which forms the basis of innovation in the organization. Looking at the center of the picture (1), an existing need can be solved by an existing solution from the organization assets, an existing need can be solved by inventing a new optimized/efficient solution and a new need itself can be identified and solved using a solution that  has been already figured out. You may be wondering why there is no combination of new needs plus new solutions, and I would call it a discovery instead of innovation and hence I am not including that in the picture above and avoid talking about that combination in this article.  The discovery mechanism works in research organizations or organizations that are investing in cutting edge new products and taking a lot of risk. For most organizations, innovation will fall under the categories shown in the above picture.

Basics - Key Questions

While looking at any new ideas or needs to address innovation challenges in the organization, there are few key questions that need to be looked in to and addressed. 

“It is all about value that a particular innovation can create and the pain point that it can solve for your customers”

Is the need real? Basically, does the need that someone trying to solve exits with a clear “pain point”? If there is no real bottle neck or pain point that a particular need or solution is trying to address, the need may not be real. So, it becomes very important to validate that the key pain point and a need associated with it, that a innovative solution is trying to address. Even though there can be lots of needs that can be solved, the cost benefit analysis of how much value can be created by solving a particular need with an innovative solution needs to be examined before any resources can be committed to it. 

Is the new / innovation solution going to create satisfaction / deliver value? How much user satisfaction or customer value that the new innovative solution create? If a new innovative solution is envisioned to replace an existing solution, the additional value that the new innovative solution creates needs to be assessed beforehand. 

User adoption of the solutions identified as part of innovation efforts are another key element that needs emphasis. No matter how good the solution is, if its target users can’t adopt to the solution or embrace it, the solution will not fly too far after all the energy and capital spent in building it is wasted.

Basics - Types of Innovation

Pull and Push are the basic types of innovation. At a high level, pull type of innovation focuses on identifying opportunities that needs to be addressed or solved with innovative ideas / solutions to meet external market demands / customer needs that any organization serves whereas Push type of innovation focuses on building new solutions driven by organizations internal capabilities, expertise, research and bringing new products / services into the market place.

There are several innovation type buzzwords you hear in the industry, and I will mention some of them below for your reference.

Sustaining Innovation: It involves incremental improvements to existing products, services and processes in the organization to enhance the performance and efficiency of its offerings in the marketplace.
Disruptive Innovation: It involves trying to bring disruptive products and services to the marketplace and replace established products and services. 

Open Innovation: It involves collaborating with various partners to jointly develop new products, services and technologies.

Closed Innovation: Which is very common in the industry where internal resources within the organization are used for idea generation and development Other types of innovation include product, process, business model, design type innovations and the list go on, since innovation has a role to play in every single aspect of the organizations small and large.

In the upcoming parts of this article series, we will talk about a popular innovation framework that can help leaders think more in depth about leading innovation in their organizations.

For the previous article in this series, refer to this URL https://cloud.govciooutlook.com/cxoinsights/leading-innovation-nid-2000.html

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