The Digital Organization Practices Break Through Innovation

There are organizational cultures that encourage innovation and there is the rest of the pack. The successful digital organization realizes that people have to be rewarded for innovation and other people need to be given a safety net.. If an organization is just interested in maintaining their cherished best practices and not challenging themselves by constantly searching for a better way, they will wind up on a bad path.. Digital organizations find ways of dealing with change. See a compelling blog post by Elise Olding on the myth of change resistance:

http://blogs.gartner.com/elise-olding/2014/04/09/change-resistance-is-a-myth/

I've identified five things organizations can do to foster innovation below.

Innovation Through Collaboration:

Really sharp organizations find ways to engage all their constituents leveraging the latest collaboration methods, particularly social technology. This not only includes stock holders, board members, customers and employees, but partners, suppliers, value chain participants and the collective set of public groups that have diverse goal sets.

Innovation Through Pattern Discovery:

Innovation focused organizations are hungry for emerging better practices and have ways of watching the interaction and collaborations in and around business events, complaints, cancellations and successful collaborations that may be indicative of better practices or opportunities to tune existing practices.

Innovation Through Proactive Analytics:

Many organizations are just satisfied with managing through history for better optimization opportunities, but the innovation focused organizations leverage multiple and new analytics to find better opportunities for success. By intermixing knowledge worlds and find the statistical probability of trying new approaches, organizations can identify better alternatives. With the advent of cognitive computing this will be a growing area of opportunity.

Innovation Through Engaging Speedy Adoption:

Organizations that practice better change practices under high speed conditions are the ones that will gain advantage in leveraging the innovations they foster. This time advantage helps large and small innovations. There are a number of emerging practices around "big change" and "incremental transformation" that should deem ones attention.

Innovation Through Practicing in Sand Boxes:

The problem innovation and fast change is that risks go up. This can be obviated by practicing changes in an environment that keeps the risks low. This means that a "model business" and test beds need to be established for practicing change and the effects of those changes on the business in an accelerated fashion. Simulation is one of those cherished practices.

Net; Net:

If your organization is not thinking innovation, especially for revenue generation and customer retention these days, you had better be looking over your shoulder. Innovation is no longer an option, it's a necessity.