The New Book “Digital IT - 100 Q&As” Chapter 3 Digital IT Innovation Paradox Q&As

Innovation is the light every forward-looking organization is pursuing. However, innovation management has an overall very low success rate. For most businesses, innovation is still serendipitous, not so many people like innovation, and innovation stands for risks. Hence, it is crucial to examine the causes of innovation failure, identify and develop innovation practitioners, and stimulate the healthy debates about how to improve the probability of innovation success and make the innovation journey more delightful?
Why is so difficult to find the fuel for the innovation engine of the organization? Innovation is an important business capability to decide the business’ long term prosperity. But often the term “innovation” has become so diluted or meaning it is hard to have even a basic conversation without problems of definition or interpretation. No one can always forecast future technological advances or the next business and industry disruptor accurately. However, one can create a system that will recognize and capture technological advances as they appear. A way of doing this is by creating innovation ecosystems in which innovation can be nurtured and fruited into its maturity. Why is so difficult to find the fuel for the innovation engine of the organization? Because innovation is neither a one time business initiative nor an isolated process. At the heart of innovation, much of what needs to happen is just change management. So, there is an extra paradox, which is that it is easy to set up an innovation management process or team, but very difficult to find the fuel for this engine. And that is why most of the innovations are carried by a startup. Building a culture of innovation is important for those that are not or not innovating well, and change management mechanism needs to be well embedded in innovation processes to foster innovation culture and lubricate the innovation engine.
How does IT handle investigations of innovative business solutions? Digital is the age of options, it provides the opportunity to think the new way to do things. IT plays a critical role in building business competency. So, it forces IT leaders to get really creative on how they architect and implement change, and how IT handles investigation of innovative business solutions. CIOs need to be better-rounded than to have a title of logical or creative. They should be good at both, be logical enough to plan, engineer and follow through, but more importantly, a CIO needs to be creative and persuasive in order to get their ideas approved and funded. IT has to take a holistic approach to handling the investigation of innovative business solutions, not for fixing symptoms, but to cure the root cause and create business differentiation. To break the mold, IT needs to rethink itself as an innovative hub of the business composed not only of technical “gurus,” but rather of business “gurus,” who also happen to be technically proficient. They can understand the real-world business problems deeply and investigate innovative business solutions from the customer’s lenses, not from IT perspective, with the ultimate goals to run, grow, and transform the business, maximize its digital potential and achieve high-performance business result.
Should creativity and process go hand-in-hand: Creativity is becoming increasingly crucial in today’s business environment as it breeds innovation. Without creativity, organizations would be upstaged by the ones that are creative because disruptive innovation will happen no matter you are well prepared or not. The paradox for innovation management is that - Should creativity and process go hand in hand? High-performance IT organizations that continue to be successful can manage this tension between defined processes and creativity well. They understand the need for the process, but they also should invest in R&D, hoping that staff will use their creative talents to deliver competitive advantage. It is a creativity with a focus, or even a strategy that requires the real discipline to design and implement the technology. Creativity and process go hand in hand. Without process, there is chaos and from the chaos, it’s hard to be creative. It is critical that the creativity is focused not on the technology itself, but on how it can be used to advance the business objectives. IT framework type disciplines are used with solid technical skills that understand how the technology really works. Otherwise, it is a stifling process that destroys creativity and drives IT cost even higher.
Overall speaking, innovation has three phases: discovery of a problem or new ideas; designing a prototype solution and the ultimate delivery of a commercially astute outcomes. Therefore, the best point of view is to see innovation as a system, capable of delivering the organizational wide capability. Do be afraid of the failure, but you have to learn something from your failure, continually learning, debating, making non-repeatable mistakes and taking calculated risksFollow us at: @Pearl_Zhu