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Innovation Management – Can you survive without it
Amichai Gross

Ami Gross

Innovation Management -
Can you survive without it?

The Environment

In today’s world, organizations are facing constant changes where the market continuously evolves, and the employee community consistently creates disruption; the workforce demands more from organizations, products, and services have shorter shelf-lives, and processes need to continually be updated to keep up with the changes. The world we live in requires an adaptive innovation relationship between the organization and all of the change agents, those variables that the organization continuously faces.

Integrating the Process

Innovation management is now becoming a necessary function for each organization to stay adaptive to the changes. Innovation is no longer linear and no longer periodic; it needs to be continuous as the ever-changing environment requires organizations to constantly question their requirements. The challenges that organizations face never stop to flow. They vary both in intensity and frequency. Therefore, organizations need to be fit to deal with them as they appear and, on the way, identify the opportunities that come along.

The Organization as an Innovation Organism

The inevitable cycle of solving challenges and seizing those opportunities is vicious in a way that an organization can’t allow itself to miss any of them as it might find itself out of the game. The market does not give any leeway for organizations that are unfit to deal with changes. Therefore an organization needs to be flexible enough to build ad-hoc task forces in order to deal with priority challenges and seize the opportunities as they appear. The best way to do so as not to have any specific business unit that deals with innovation, but rather the entire organization becomes an innovation organism that feeds off the power of the crowd.

Assuming the Innovation Process

Now that the organization realizes anyone can innovate and ‘the best next best thing’ can come from any player on the organizational map (employees, vendors, or customers), then the organization needs to become much more receptive.
The best way to be receptive is to have an innovation process that allows those sporadic inputs to occur and feed into an implementable mechanism.

A significant objective in an innovation process is to take notice of those challenges and opportunities that need to be dealt with as opposed to those that don’t. Therefore, a priority needs to be set in the form of a mechanism that will allow sorting the required from the unnecessary by a scale that can create a priority-based innovation catalog. The catalog is a way to organize innovation to focus only on practicality where many of the ideas, challenges, and opportunities can be unfocused and steer off of the main course.
Once the organization assumes the process, it can easily identify the good or the bad, choosing to prove only good ideas, turning them into solutions, and then implementing them. As much as we would want to automate and streamline the innovation process, it requires an active owner. In this case, it is the Innovation manager, who is in charge and responsible for the continuous flow of input into the process and the well-prioritized output. This means that the process would allow anyone to input, but the criteria to prioritize which idea turn into a solution would be owned by the innovation manager, who acts as the shepherd of the organization. The innovation manager sets the standards that dictate how, when, and why we promote an idea to go through the solutionization process and eventually get implemented.

The Efficient Mechanism

Innovation needs to be a well-oiled machine that turns ideas into solutions and then systematically implements them. On the one hand, the organization can’t be hesitant about implementing ideas, but on the other hand, It cannot be wasteful when dispensing resources. The organization needs to focus on the practical ideas that bring value and, in regards to implementation, carefully choose what to do next.

An organization must create its own recipe for success; therefore, the innovation process needs to be simple, clear, focused, quick, efficient, and, most importantly, needs to bring real results that are implementable in a short time frame.
Once the organization implements the innovation process and shows real results, it will attract the right people to innovate, which will create a perpetual forward motion that will guide the organization to good results without too much effort.

Summary Points

An organization that has innovative thought and responsible people that know how to implement solutions can gain good results by following a step-by-step methodical process. To summarize the process is simple, but implementation takes time, meaning like any other grade or skill innovation is not something that happens overnight therefore gradually an organization becomes more fit to take on more complex challenges it will require the organization to be patient and methodological about implementing Innovation as a way of life. Innovation needs to run in everyone’s veins, and eventually, everyone in the organization will need to understand that they are responsible for the future of the organization. Everyone must know that their idea is their own initiative, which means that success is in their own hands. On the other hand everyone needs to know that innovation cannot be run sporadically, it needs to be effective and answer real requirements. Lastly, think deeply on how and when to implement each idea, remember it needs to answer a relevant requirement – always solve a real challenge. Good luck to all!

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