The Monthly Innovation Brief: Digital Innovation Classification Aug. 2016

Innovation takes a cycle of observing-questioning-connecting-networking-experimenting. From the management perspective, innovation is how to transform novel ideas to achieve its business value, due to the hyper-complexity of modern business, innovation is essentially about reducing the unnecessary business complexity to tackle the complexities of business dynamic. Here is a series of blogs to brainstorm the digital trends of innovation.       Digital Innovation ClassificationHow to Classify Innovation  The world is becoming more hyper-connected with the latest digital technology advancement, are we ready to open the new chapter of digital innovation? Can we develop an approach which also places social, political and ethnic differences within a common framework to generate meaningful progress toward the next level of innovation? Is it possible to integrate the innovative concepts into a comprehensive approach that can generate intelligent solutions to the seemingly insurmountable large-scale problems? For example, how do you balance the partitioning of land and sea between man and nature? How can you use energy from sunlight to recycle all mass at the molecular scale locally? And if you were the Chief Innovation Officer in the organization or on the Earth, what’s your innovation agenda?
Open Innovation vs. Closed Innovation Innovation has different types: Radical innovation/breakthrough innovation; evolutionary innovation or incremental innovation; innovation also has different flavors: open innovation or closed innovation: Open innovation = innovation whereby a company uses the ideas, sources or help of people outside the company. These people are normally business partners, customers or crowd-sourcing consultants. Closed innovation = Innovation whereby a company uses their internal R&D or talent across-company for managing innovation life cycle.
Can Corporate Do Disruptive Innovation  Fundamentally there are two types of innovations, incremental innovation, and disruptive innovation; on one side, many ambitious organizations have big plans to pursue disruptive innovation in creating exponential value for their businesses; on the other hand, it takes bigger risks to manage disruptive innovation, and therefore, it has very low success rate. Can corporate do disruptive innovation, and how?
 Is “Incremental” Innovation not Innovation? Generally speaking, innovation is how to transform the novel ideas into products and services to achieve its business value. Innovation has different flavors and also has various definitions as well. Is innovation always radical or disruptive; is ‘incremental’ innovation an innovation or oxymoron? How to manage innovation portfolio effectively?
Management Innovation ? Innovation is the light every organization is pursuing, however, from industry study, most companies renovate instead of innovating; what’s the underlying problems? Does that mean management innovation is perhaps the new angle to see through innovation management, as management innovation changes the way managers do what they do to improve organizational performance, where innovation is one of many management practices, but the critical one?
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