”Focus on the product” this is the best way to fail by implementing Innovation.

”Focus on the product” this is the best way to fail by implementing Innovation.

Companies are being worried about the change and their capacity to be innovative in the market, which is really demanding, but this change does not happen by itself. It should be induced, administrated and encouraged in a way that could inspire the organization, in order to see the benefits that in the new future it may be able to achieve.

”Focus on the product” this is the best way to fail by implementing Innovation.

Innovation is a whole experience, this includes a proposition to solve, in a different way, a problem that from the launching to reach the place where no-one has gotten until to discover how to reach the maximum of it. That is why if we only focus on the product itself, we are definitively failing.

The innovation proposition′ sophistication comes from the combination of different presented actors in the whole process, this is, of course, a bit harder but: aren’t we working on it to do or make the best of it?

Then, why do you have to be settled with a minimum experience?

We just name it as Open or Close Innovation, Agile, Scrum, Sprint or the same Design Thinking, which at the end, these are not more than tools when the objective is to establish an Innovation Culture.

To us, Design Thinking Sweden is a powerful part of a whole called Taxonomy of the Innovation tools, which help us come up with strategical initiatives, interdisciplinary or entrepreneurial, allowing connections among concepts, methods and the changes in the perspective. That could be, on the other hand, overlooked the “solving problem” monodisciplinary perspective.

Therefore, it seems much more serious to create a referential Framework from it heading towards the Innovation Top. It is not only using co-creation tools nor focusing on product innovation. Because, in the end, without a strong pillar-based Culture, making innovation of the product will not be worthy.

And in order to achieve that I should ask myself what to do, I need to implement Innovation? And maybe the most serious and polite people would answer me ”to create valuable products.” And again, we could go straight to the beginning.

To create valuable services or products we should see, analyze and work in the whole process and chain and not only to focus on the first thing nor, too many, the obvious one.

According to the OECD definition of Innovation ”the implementation of a new improvement or sign of a product (good or service), a process, a new marketing method or a new organizational all-it-all in business practices instead of the organization works or external relationships. It goes far beyond the confines of research labs to users, suppliers, and consumers everywhere – in government, business and non-profit organizations, across borders, across sectors, and across institutions

Inside the Innovation idea, there must be security; and the mapping of the land we want to explore and be familiar with.

Therefore, How can Innovation be used to generate wealth and abundance?

Here the Successful Femsa Case:

Thinking about our world-wide clients, we have decided to immerse ourselves into their needs to understand how to help them in implementing a winner platform. And here it is where Innovation is transformed into Configuration, Supply, and Demand.

Process innovations involve the activities and operations that produce an enterprise’s primary offerings. Innovating here requires a dramatic change from “business as usual” that enables the company to use unique capabilities, function efficiently, adapt quickly and build market-leading margins. Process innovations often form the core competency of an enterprise and may include patented or proprietary approaches that yield advantage for years or even decades. Ideally, they are the “special sauce” you use that competitors simply can’t replicate.

In this example, it is only referring to Configuration based on Structure and processes.

One of the most compelling challenges for organizations is to increase their performance or efficiency in Innovation, not only on focusing on making new products.

One of the most recent and richest experiences of this Innovation process was working with FEMSA/ Coca Cola and its great creative mind team. We were focusing on 4 months so as to introduce different Design Thinking techniques in 3 main aspects: Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation.

Our goal was to always offer them Innovation processes teasing to unique, adaptable skills and also efficient enough to build their pillars in their Innovation Culture. We even created MVPs with specific topics in terms of products and services. We tested some alternatives and different approaches in real cases, by exposing the team to go into the Taxonomy (tools box), as well as with the techniques, mapping, and methods.

To be able to transform that information into knowledge, that not only generated a learning but also to make it tangible, through Innovation, it nowadays represents the most important organizational capacity in those economical environments and in complex markets such as Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995; Bierley and Chakrabarti, 1996; Bidrag, 1997, among others.

During the different sessions, have we discovered: the strategical dimension and the objectives of learning and the management of knowledge. We have identified the ideas to be developed and, from here, we integrated the Taxonomy of the techniques to be learned as well as the tools. The goal has been to understand the moment in which the innovation process, their results and the impact measurement can be applied to every 100 ones that, nowadays, conforms Innovation. Going from the Divergent Thinking towards the Convergence of action.

Once we reach this moment, we have technological supervision and competitive intelligence projects. 

The basis of this Innovation management consists of the implementation of generation systems, conservation and knowledge management in the organization. To identify how and when useful knowledge is generated for business and the existing systemic practices to integrate them into the organization′s practices.

The knowledge economy generates a real Innovation start-up and Femsa is building a strong Innovative Culture. (The Culture Factor).

To sum up, I would like to mention that if we focused on understanding the “what for” we would surely achieve a huge boost in the company's profitability.

Not everything In Innovation is making products.

Carolina Salazar / #DesignThinkingSweden #digitaltransformation #organizations #knowledge #uxversity