For this assignment, you will continue to reflect on what it takes to create “innovation architecture” to support a culture of innovation within organizations. As part of the assignment, you will conduct an interview with a local business owner or leader or member of a management team to learn more about the techniques organizations utilize (or fail to utilize) to encourage and support the implementation of innovations.
Select your interview candidate and contact the person to set up an appointment. Try to schedule your interview well in advance of the assignment’s due date. You may conduct your interview in person or via phone. You should present the consent letter attached in the Module materials to the person you intend to interview.
Prepare a list of at least 5-7 questions for your interview. Your questions should focus on specific processes within organizations for encouraging and implementing innovations and challenges organizations face in when trying to innovate.
1. Determine Rules of Governance – innovation governance is primarily concerned with establishing processes and rules for accountability, responsibility and decision making that will drive effective innovation in an organization. However, there are many other aspects and requirements to support innovation governance, such as roles, responsibilities, prioritization, and managing complex initiatives across multiple functional areas, expertise, participation and contributions with internal and external organizational constituents. While these rules are needed to clearly define decision making, approvals and empowerment for the innovation process, they also reflect the innovation aspirations and culture of the business.
2. Defining Lean Innovation Processes – applying lean principles and leveraging established best practices are key establishing effective innovation processes. Although most organizations have established innovation processes, they should take critical look at performance results compared with industry benchmarks to determine where to focus for developing the next generation of processes. The revised processes must apply the decision-making rigor from the Rules of Governance and mandatory tasks defined by the Innovation Master Data. Within the framework of the rules and master data, it defines the corporate process standards and core minimum requirements that allow process variance while maintaining the integrity of the portfolio. This enables increased process adoption in divisions previously resisting a centralized process (common in organizations that have grown by acquisition) while bringing process discipline to hitherto unmanageable numbers of processes accumulated over years of evolutionary growth. Processes addressed include strategic planning, portfolio management, product innovation (from ideation to market launch) and product range management through to market closure.
3. Identifying Innovation Master Data – use an industry model such as Porter’s Value Chain and Balanced Scorecards to structured and develop a company’s own innovation master data-set. Ensure that every key area of innovation data is considered and promotes discussion and investigation into the information architecture and data responsibilities in the organization. Without this clear, data-oriented perspective, the information systems and processes will be prone to rework, miscommunication, duplicate data ownership and ultimately be unable to create portfolio views that can be trusted. The core set of innovation master data establishes what is mandatory within certain types of process and becomes instructive for systems interface definition.
4. The Communications Directive – formulate the directives for the organization to communicate its innovation strategy with urgency, openness and practical steps for success. In discussion with the responsible executives for delivering innovation at board level, draft, review, socialize and develop the directive. This document defines leadership responsibilities and accountabilities and sets the business context for all four deliverables. It creates momentum, communicates the innovation culture and demonstrates a leadership and organizational commitment to innovation.
Benefits of Developing an Innovation Process Architecture
Identify some of the significant challenges you believe you might face when it comes to suggesting and seeing innovations through in the organizations in which you are or may be involved?
An innovative culture requires strong leaders who realise that changes in the culture start with themselves. Innovation is usually a small idea or adjustment that people start with and continually change over time, which requires a disciplined approach and an environment where it is safe to question how things get done. To make innovation happen you need to consider the investment portfolio at enterprise level and focus on customers and the core operations.
Joanne Molesky, principal associate at ThoughtWorks and co-author of the book Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale, spoke about growing an innovative culture at Lean Kanban France 2017. InfoQ is covering this conference with write-ups, interviews, and articles.
Technology has become a strategic capability to get new customers or serve existing ones. The business is technology, argued Molesky.
To grow an innovative culture, you need people and processes. According to the article Dismal Employee Engagement Is a Sign of Global Mismanagement on Gallup, the majority of employees are disengaged:
An innovative culture is one that actively embraces change and seeks out new ways to get the work done and deliver better value to customers and other key stakeholders. This includes being able to change processes, services, products, or organisational structure and communication to meet changes in market forces in a timely manner. To achieve this, there are three key elements required:
How might you apply what you learned in your interview and about innovation architecture in general to help foster a culture of innovation within your own organization?
There are many pieces to the innovation puzzle, and they will come together differently for each organization.
How one goes about building an innovative organization ought to be unique. But for every organization, it starts with the right mindset–the unexpected must be expected.
Who would have thought that cell phones would become cameras and music players? Who would have thought that ordinary, non-techie people would socially connect with the global audience with their personal devices?
This mindset must begin at the top of the organization and permeate every level. And most importantly, it includes the intangibles of culture: the beliefs, expectations, and sense of purpose of those in the organization
Creative thinking and collaboration can be encouraged and rewarded, or in many formal and subtle ways discouraged. It’s the leader’s job to get it right.
Here’s what people might be thinking in a non-innovative environment:
“Our company is too big to waste time on small ideas.”
“We want new ideas, but I’m paid to make my numbers on existing
business.”
“I can’t remember manufacturing and marketing ever talking about
anything.”
“We’re doing fine; let’s let our existing line peak before we try
something new.”
“People are going to get cynical about all these change
initiatives.”
Of all the changes Lou Gerstner found necessary when he became CEO at IBM, culture was the hardest. He would have preferred to stay away from it and stick with the strategy, analysis, and measurement style he had been successful with before.
But in Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance he writes:
“I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game–it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value. Vision, strategy, marketing, financial management–any management system, in fact–can set you on the right path and carry you for a while. But no enterprise–whether in business, government, education, health care, or any area of human endeavor–will succeed over the long haul if those elements aren’t part of its DNA.”
Culture is not one of those soft matters to be dealt with when the real business is done. Culture is a complement to the formal, established rules of doing business. An understanding of and commitment to the organization’s mission will guide employees when confronted by the unexpected for which no rules exist.
It is all too easy for organizations to fall into the analysis trap and focus on left-brain skills like process, measurement, and execution. Sustained innovation enterprises embrace right-brained skills: creativity, imagination, analogy, and empathy. Unlike most organizations that separate these individuals into silos (such as marketing versus engineering), innovative enterprises build teams that morph as new processes and ideas unfold. This results in the creation of focus during ideation and analytical emphasis as market growth accelerates.
How often in corporations and other organizations do existing fiefdoms stifle any attempt to do something differently?
When studied carefully, innovative organizations are consistently able to do the following:
LISTEN
Members of an organization’s internal and external community often have tremendous insights and ideas that lead to new innovations.
STAY OPEN
Ideas don’t always come from experts. Sometimes the greatest innovations come from novices and backroom tinkers. Open-minded organizations often convert off-the-wall ideas into marketable products.
COLLABORATE
No organization holds all the cards in developing new innovation. Collaboration with outside groups–complementary corporations, universities, government agencies, and think tanks–often brings new perspectives and ideas to the innovation process.
GO FLAT
A flat management structure doesn’t have the long approval processes and disjointed lines of communications that impede innovation. Organizations that can’t go flat in management can achieve the same results by empowering workers to act independently.
EMBRACE FAILURE
Many of the greatest innovations’ leapfrogs were unintended results and, oftentimes, created by accident. Breakthroughs such as the discovery of penicillin or the power of microwaves were the result of accidents.
An innovative culture begins with the organizational attitude of accepting that the world really has changed. It’s about cultivating a mindset to learn to see the world in new ways
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