How can you prioritize innovation without sacrificing other strategic priorities?

Change is the only constant. And with change comes innovation. In case the innovation considered is with high achievable and business potential, but it does not align with the company’s strategy, consider progressing with it on a different/new unit/division separated from the main company’s business so they could live side by side. Always ask yourself what the go/no go areas of the company are and keep the resources invested in innovation to what was decided within your strategy.

No innovation - no growth ????♀? In my view, neglecting innovation in strategic planning can hinder a company's growth and adaptability. Without innovation, businesses risk becoming outdated, losing competitive edge, and failing to meet evolving customer needs. It's essential to integrate innovation into core strategies for sustained success and relevance. ??

Aligning innovation with your overall strategy is pivotal. It involves understanding the core problems and opportunities unique to your business. This alignment ensures that every innovative effort not only resonates with your company’s mission and values but also brings tangible benefits to customers and stakeholders. By integrating innovation into the strategic framework, you create a coherent pathway for progress, ensuring that innovation efforts are not just creative endeavors but strategic tools driving business success.

Indeed, don't prioritize innovation over strategy or the other way around. They are equally important and cannot live without each other. Match trends and other future changes to your strategic elements to create hunting grounds or search areas in which you execute your innovation efforts. This prevents you're working on innovation projects that are not relevant for the company, and that you'll probably never get funding for anyways...

Upstream Energy Industry Perspective: The focus is aligning innovation with strategic objectives, especially in developing sustainable energy solutions. Investments in new technologies boost operational efficiency and promote environmental sustainability, balancing economic growth with ecological care. The industry prioritizes eco-friendly innovations like carbon capture and renewable energy, reflecting a commitment to the planet. These innovations aim to improve efficiency, cut costs, and increase safety in exploration and production. Collaboration with technology companies and academic institutions is key, to nurturing a culture of innovation and tapping into research. The sector is adapting creating flexible and robust business models

If Innovation isn't mentioned in employees' job descriptions, business goals or personal growth plans, it's unlikely that they will dedicate themselves to it. With increasing use of AI and automation at work, we need to imagine an environment that sets aside time for exploration, rewards creativity and treats occasional failures as opportunities to recalibrate.

Innovation necessitates a cultural shift; otherwise, it risks becoming mere lip service. An inclusive environment, where every individual is empowered to contribute novel ideas and question the status quo, is imperative. Leadership and management play a pivotal role in fostering innovation by establishing a framework that promotes trust, continuous learning, and recognizes and rewards innovative endeavors while refraining from penalizing mistakes that serve as valuable learning experiences.

A great exercise for creating a culture of innovation is to ask your team: "What would it take for us to be known as the most innovative team in (fill in the blank - 'this company', 'this sector', 'this industry' are common ambitions I am asked to help teams achieve). Discuss performance shifts in WHAT you would be doing and HOW you would be doing it. Define outcomes, ways of working and their dependencies. What would you be doing more of, less of? What would you stop doing / start doing? How would you measure success and stay accountable for your behaviour shifts? Develop a plan, run some experiments and then ensure that the innovation plan becomes an immovable agenda items in your regular team meetings. That alone can be a game changer!

I think it's important to consider that actually not everyone is, or wants to be: creative, innovative or entrepreneurial / intrapreneurial. We need to foster an innovative and collaborative environment for those that can, and wish to, innovate. At the same time, if someone just wants to crack on with things and do things efficiently and accurately, then that should be understood by leadership as just as useful. Innovation needs to be accessible and freeing, rather than enforced.

Innovation doesn't pop up out of blue. This comes from one's day to day routine task those are repeative and manual. Innovation at its best is driven out of a strong culture and a solution driven approach to tackle issues we see on a regular basis, which consumes a lot of bandwidth. Time management and commitment are key pillars. Innovation comes from the challenges that one faces every day, for example invention of Wheel was first innovation and that is still relevant as its used in almost every thing we use today, be it a mixer, fan, car, or spacecraft, wheel structure represents Motor transformation. Its mindset and cultural shift on being observant, problem solving acumen. Rewards encourage, sense of accomplishment that drives people.

Assess the state of your current portfolio of innovations and set goals for how it should look like. Align it with strategy and start shifting direction by having clear metrics.

First: define and communicate an ambitious vision to the company about what you are trying to achieve. Then make space for people to try out a lot of different stuff. Allow them to surprise you, to test, iterate, spend time playing around - as long as they core job is taken care of. Then assess and manage frequently: kill ideas that didn't flourish, merge duplicates and double down on projects with potential. Then repeat. If you knew what innovation looked like, it would be easier. But you have no idea - by definition. So nurture a fertile ground, encourage everyone to try their luck and refresh your garden regularly.

Potential partners will objectively assess the innovation projects that you propose to them. You need to apply similar metrics in order to initially select projects and in managing your ongoing workload to ensure that you are honestly managing your portfolio and giving your best effort to your best opportunities.

Innovation is within culture of organization and also many a times need of the time. Some industries need faster innovations while others take it slow, depending on their risk appetite. Strategy of the company should define the amount of innovation that the company can concentrate on according to this need. As the need changes with time, the strategy should have the agility to accomodate this shift.

Report and adapt your innovation portfolio activities for 3 key areas: 1. Management - output 2. Process - flow 3. People - input Having the right indicators will fuel the right discussion at all level of the company

I have been utilising the quadruple helix model for innovation for almost a decade. Having a diverse network from business, academia, the public sector and the third sector helps identify opportunities to innovate and to collaborate with people and organisations with the knowledge and expertise you will need to create innovative products and services and to validate their performance. A key attribute in finding partners for collaborative innovation is to consider their motivations and desired outcomes from working together and propose projects that are mutually beneficial.

Embed innovation as a strategic cornerstone! A culture of cost-effective, continuous improvement is vital; even the finest strategy can falter without it. Despite imperfections, the anticipation for the next breakthroughs persists.

“If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together”. African Proverb – Martha Goedert There’s so much truth and inspiration stemming from this quote as collaboration enables access to ideas, insights, lessons learnt, research, skills and capabilities which one individual or organisation alone would not possess to deliver optimal outcomes effectively and efficiently.

You should try to consider all the perspectives that are relevant. In many cases we also see a lack of internal capacity - or competence, to deal with certain innovation projects. Especially when it comes to non-core innovation, venture builders can play a crucial role in moving innovative projects forward, using a structured approach to validate ideas, identify market opportunities and eventually scaling inventions to innovations.

And put it on the agenda as a regular and reciprocal activity ,innovation it is not a "sometime" thing, it is an iterative proces which needs to be fostered

Validate your stage gate decisions on Innovation. Make sure your process supports the right initiatives and help the others pivot. In any scenario, collect lesson learned on each innovation and adapt .

There are only three rules to consider here. 1. Listen to customers. 2. Listen to customers. 3. Listen to customers. And if that fails... keep listening.

To effectively learn and adapt in the innovation process, focus on tangible, quantifiable metrics rather than subjective feedback or qualitative insights. This approach allows for objective data-driven decision-making that can steer your innovation efforts towards actual market demand and user satisfaction. Of course, it is essential to combine tangible and intangible metrics to understand comprehensively how your innovation is performing, and qualitative insights might give you the "big why" behind the data.

A inova??o e a adaptabilidade s?o duas irm?s inseparáveis. Juntas s?o resilientes e permitem que os negócios enfrentem desafios com criatividade e flexibilidade buscando sempre a excelência. Tudo esta em constante movimento e adptar-se é vital para a sobrevivência das empresas.

Lebenslanges Lernen f?rdert die eigene Leistungsf?higkeit und h?lt einen pers?nlich fit. Besonders wichtig ist es, unterschiedliche Sichtweisen und Erfahrungen in den Lernprozess einzubeziehen. Nehmen Sie die Ideen und den Erfahrungsschatz unterschiedlicher Generationen auf und reflektieren Sie die Erkenntnisse.

Ambidextarity is certainly a very useful model, but I believe it is limiting the narrative to one critical paradox, that of exploitation and exploration. I would expand it to other critical innovation paradoxes and amplify the paradoxical leadership aspect as a key driver to an innovation strategy approach.

The notion of Ambidexterity in Innovation provides an excellent path towards managing both, the "Exploitation" of available resource, ideas, profitable solutions that sustain the organization (and the exploration efforts), and the "Exploration" of new ideas, horizons, moonshots, which provides an opportinity for the company to ensure it's longevity and success. The balance of the two will be different in any organization and depends on the lifecycle stage, however the need for both is evident in all organizations that are looking to remain relevant.

Delivery excellence is a critical consideration that should be at the forefront of everyone’s mind. What those in senior management envision as the ideal approach or implementation might not be what the users and community consider effective.

After twenty five years in innovation and twenty years in strategy, it looks like I didn’t know what I’m doing but the question does not make sense.

One of my favorite tools is to frame the innovation. Steve Blank calls it 3-horizon thinking. Focus 70% or more on the near term, most important thing for the business to succeed as the 1st Horizon. Second, or midterm, allocate about 10-20% on activities that will supplement or expand the near-term needs. Finally, far out 3rd Horizon work should be 5-10% and look at changing the playing field for competition or business development. This is the hardest, longest, AND the most rewarding outcome. Constantly communicate with senior team where each project or experiment is and where resources are allocated.