How can leaders foster a culture of innovation in a digital era?

Leaders must have a great understanding of their organization and its eco-system of employees, customers, vendors, partners, etc. Without this, you miss great opportunities to digitize the organization. It is the leaders job to articulate the strengths and big gaps. Many organizations and leaders jump into innovation without asking the right questions at the start.

In our project work we have addressed Digitalisation as broken down into 3 stages 1. Awareness – raising the awareness of the potential in delivery and content to both the company and the learner 2. Transformation – mapping out and enabling the pathway to transformation 3. Implementation – developing the digital interface and tools necessary to implement the digitalisation journey In today’s digital world encompassing big data, digital pathways and micro delivery we have identified that it is mission critical to raise ’ awareness regarding the complexity of using digital technologies and social media for learning. We have identified that developing critical digital competences is in fact key to everyone, especially and supporting systems.

Involvement from end users (who may or may not be employees) is also critical. In order to truly understand the problems you are trying to solve, obtaining first-hand accounts from those who experience the pain points is key. Often times, leadership's perceptions of key pain points are different than those in the field. Empowering these people be a part of the innovation process will help focus on problems that matter the most to those who will benefit from the solution.

The ARISE integrated approach is critical so we can empower all to engage not only effectively but also ethically with the current socio-technical ecosystem.

New digital technologies will empower and enable people with the skills, training, and abilities to do jobs they previously couldn’t have. The better we train and equip workers across the industry innovation value chain then they in turn can use these skills to deliver a better, greener more energy efficient result.

Leaders must also redefine what "deliverables" mean for innovation teams. Because the goal of innovation is to explore disruptive, game changing ideas, if innovation teams are under the same pressures to deliver as product teams, only low hanging fruit will be harvested. This turns an innovation org into a continuous improvement one. To achieve breakthroughs, innovation teams must be free of pressure to constantly deliver product. Instead, innovation deliverables should include things like number of experiments conducted, reports of learnings, and recommendations on how to proceed (or not) with a given idea. This will allow innovation teams the freedom to fearlessly push the envelope without penalty if ideas fail or don't make it to market.

One of the greatest challenges industry faces is that of innovation shortages. These shortages manifests itself in many places especially in achieving energy efficiencies across the entire value chain. This is significant in that industry is struggling to improve competitiveness. To rectify this the current reactive innovative approach must become more forward looking and shift towards a more proactive approach