Innovation - more important than ever before

"Disruptive innovation of the future needs to flow through an unfettered conduit between creators, customers and communities.”

Why does Innovation matter?

• 52% of Fortune 500 - gone bankrupt, acquired or ceased to exist since 2000. 3/4th of today's S&P 500 will be replaced by 2027.
• Disruptive innovation will likely upend a wide range of industries over the coming years
• Leveraging the power of digital, startups and niche firms are fast displacing established brands and unbundling value chains across industry segments. Especially automotive, banking, consumer goods, health care and hospitality

5 steps to driving innovation in an organization:

• Build the foundation: Without a strong foundation and culture that recognizes innovation, disruptive innovation in a company can become a flash-in-the-pan occurrence that isn’t sustainable. The larger a company becomes, the more difficult it can be to move quickly through new ideas, evaluate them and take them to the next step in their evolution. It is important to create an environment and an innovation framework to enable this. 

• Discover and articulate the real customer problem: Too often, innovation is thrown at a problem after merely scanning the symptoms and not identifying the root cause. Breaking down the problem to its core can bring surprisingly rich insights and can prevent millions of rupees being thrown down the proverbial “innovation” rabbit hole, never to be seen again outside the company’s R&D business unit. 

• Think beyond the core innovation you are known for: If, for example, product innovation is your company’s traditional “innovation DNA” core, and that is solely where you focus your budgets and efforts, then you are potentially omitting the possibility of real disruption in other areas such as process, talent and operations. They may not seem as path-breaking or attention grabbing, but done together, the resulting dividends from innovation are more holistic and sustainable. 

• Co-innovate with your customers and the ecosystem: Disruptive innovation of the future needs to flow through an unfettered conduit between creators, customers and communities. The proprietary model of having a secret sauce for innovation that is closely guarded for years is quickly making way for an era where the recipe for innovation is openly shared and new flavours and adaptations are crowdsourced. The innovation ecosystem must include employees, start-ups, universities and other companies—all sources of ideas that can fuel an organization’s research agenda, identify trends that shape strategy and develop new products and solutions.
• Measure, replicate and then adapt innovation for scale: If you are potentially breaking new ground with an innovative approach, make sure it can stand the test of time and scale. Define how you will measure success. For example, it could be to increase the number of new ideas or it may be to improve the quality of the ideas. Measure this, replicate it and test it in different situations and environments. Then adapt it for scale.