Amplifying Innovation in an Organisation

With a Common Purpose, Common Language, and?Common Definition;

Organizations and their leadership drive and thrive their business with new ideas even during the trying times of pandemic through resilience, inquisitiveness, and overlooking chaos as an opportunity for innovation, when several others are spending time of negativity and pains they have gone or going through, as they hit the roof in wayfinding to escape the disruption happening in the industry. A famous quote say’s We cannot direct the wind, but we cannot adjust our sails, but to discover new routes that could lead to the ‘new land of innovation’ with a growth mindset in the ‘new normal’ or ‘new future’, requires a systematic approach.

Innovation is not only for gifted few, it’s for everyone in the organization, but it favors the prepared mind, who enable higher task motivation in their people, are open to collaboration for broadening their talent stack, and have a common language for innovation with the right tools and techniques. One of the key challenge for?Innovation is identifying and seeding a right innovation challenge, and involving everyone in the organization from a shop floor to the top floor to explore all possibilities and to spark those novel and diverse ideas, that leads to radical solutions.?Charter multiple new projects on new products, cost, and growth with the right balance, purpose, and value creation that will span over the next six months to three years. These projects need to focus on new innovative products, services, and business models with an agenda of achieving its short and near term for survival, medium or midterm to stabilize, long term goals for growth to innovate futuristic products and services, post-pandemic opportunities, and exponential efficiency in the process to reduce time to market.

Systematic Innovation enables organizations to speak one language for innovation.?The industry has seen such initiatives in the 1950s with Project Management, 1980s with Total Quality Management which helped organizations to achieve their purpose, raise their professionalism in delivery and quality quotient. McKinsey’s research says 97% of CEOs list innovation as their top priority, Innovation readiness and management are turning from discretionary activity to professional practice, and measuring innovation is a way of the operating system, from our experience; we designed a simplified process for innovators to quickly work on the challenges, here we explain the simple four steps to innovate faster.?

Four Steps of Innovation

Innovation requires four simple steps: Discover, Ideate, Create and Impact.?An organization needs to generate high-quality ideas by thinking new and rethinking the current way of doing business to deploy the solutions to achieve Exponential Efficiency, Remarkable Resilience, and Amplify Attention in products, processes, and business models.

Discover - Insights to Excellence

The first step involves deep research and study of the current challenges and its landscape, looking at Industry foresight insights, technical details, and relevant customer insights, through Patents, Insight Triggers from Future products, Technical Research Papers, Customer feedback, Complaints, Frustrations, and observations, along with competitors’ products/services, and various experiments were done in the industry. The Discover step requires a fortnight to capture these insights and prepare an insights document aligned with the Innovation challenge requirement through a journey mapping canvas to reflect new thoughts.

Ideate - Trigger with Vigour for new ideas

The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas, the innovation core team and ideation champions with high energy from the cross-functional team such as Product designers, Product or process champions, marketing Leads, chemists, user-experience specialists, project managers, manufacturing and operations specialists, customers, partners based on your industry, etc. could be the right contender to invite during the ideation. Using the traditional brainstorming method has limited possibilities, hence organizations should experiment with systematic ideation. Innomantra’s framework has pioneered generating around 600-2500 ideas for a given Innovation challenge in Two days of Systematic ideation facilitation, which brings deep insights and examples from other industries as a trigger. The intent is to capture high-quality ideas in color sticky notes or with prevailing ‘invent from anywhere’ culture through digital idea boards such as Miro? or Mural? board. Digital ideation also brings equal impact and more or less the same level of outcome in terms of the number and quality of the ideas.

Create - Build your Super ideas

As the noble laureate, Daniel Kahneman had quoted “Need Tenfold increase in perceived value to be accepted.”, the raw ideas to be collated are to be further crystallized by a razor-sharp screening process, with no biases. This can be termed as the Idea appreciation, so that we can build on those ideas (not as an evaluation) process, with a strong belief in the philosophy of?'no idea is a stupid idea'. The idea crystallization process helps the creators to identify Super ideas to appreciate them to the next level of feasibility test thus creating napkin pitches for second-level crystallization to identify potential innovation projects. The innovation milestone is to use those Super-duper ideas to create the prototypes for further Proof-of-Concept Validation. The stakeholders and sounding board reflect on the ideas presented to appreciate those high potential ideas to the next step - Impact.

Impact - Measuring Innovation

The Innovation journey ends with the presentation to the sponsors by the innovation core team and chartered project for implementation to scale. The framework and flow of the innovation process are to bring a common language, definition, purpose, within the context to e.g new products, cost, or growth and is the key takeaway as they progress in the innovation and design to scale. Some of the key measures to consider.

???????Input indicators; the number of ideas, invention disclosures, patent filings

???????Throughput indicators; development speed

???????Output indicators; ideas implemented,

???????Long term value; new revenues, return on innovation

The success mantra of innovation is to emerge as a leader in the industry, by empowering its people to bring their best and embrace new digital technology for superior solutions, lower risks, and cost of change by setting new aspirations in people with a growth mindset.