Innovation Strategy in Focus - CLARITY Wednesday

Why is it so hard to build and maintain the capacity to innovate? The reason is not simply a failure to execute, but a failure to articulate an innovation strategy that aligns innovation efforts with the overall business strategy.

3 Innovation Strategy Facts Worth Considering:

• Companies regularly define their overall business strategy (their scope and positioning) and specify how various functions — such as marketing, operations, finance, and R&D — will support it. Firms rarely articulate strategies to align their innovation efforts with their business strategies.
• A strategy is nothing more than a commitment to a set of coherent, mutually reinforcing policies or behaviors aimed at achieving a specific competitive goal. Good strategies promote alignment among diverse groups within an organization, clarify objectives and priorities, and help focus efforts on them.
• Routine innovation builds on a company’s existing technological competences and fits with its existing business model — and hence its customer base. An example is Intel’s launching ever-more-powerful microprocessors, which has allowed the company to maintain high margins and has fueled growth for decades.

Assess the Value of Having a Comprehensive Innovation Strategy to Your Organization

A company’s innovation strategy should specify how different types of technological innovation fit into their business strategy and identify the resources that should be allocated to each.

What value do you place on researching, designing and ultimately embracing a holistic strategy which defines the incremental steps required to achieve digital transformation to create a desired future environment?

Determine Your Organization's Related Pain & Frustration

In order to fully assess your level of pain (and frustration!) it’s helpful to know where you want to be. So…what does good look like?

A low pain example of a Comprehensive Innovation Strategy: We have cultivated a company culture that is conducive to innovation. We actively encourage cross-departmental collaboration and educate or encourage technology education for our employees. We provide a mechanism to solicit, capture, promote, and reward employee ideas.

What is your organization's level of pain as it relates to Innovation Strategy?

The CLARITY Assessment?

In the CLARITY Assessment? we focus on 7 key company objectives. Above, we touched on Innovation Strategy, which is one of 5 categories related to the broader objective of Technological Innovation:

Almost every company worldwide is in some stage of their own digital transformation journey. You’re invited to take the CLARITY Assessment?, with the goal of helping to define your own company priorities in your digital transformation journey. Click here to experience it now.