“Meaning-ful” Innovation – The Pull, Push and Ease Strategy that drives your Innovation
The pace of technological, cultural, and demographic changes in the world today has made innovation a center of attention for every institution today, not just to bring novelty in their products, services, and purpose but also on the mere existential plane. The pace requires organizations’ workforce to respond to situations with speed and with ingenuity such as to provide differentiation of experiences to the stakeholders. It is increasingly relevant in the organized workplaces: that are bound by structures, governance processes and systems to ensure uniform delivery of services to their customers and recipients of such service. Highlighting such pace at Toyota {Jeffrey H. Dyer and Kentaro Nobeoka, March 2000}, “Previous research suggests knowledge diffusion occurs more quickly within Toyota’ production network than in competing automaker networks. The “Black Box” of knowledge sharing within Toyota’s network and demonstrate that Toyota’s ability to effectively create and manage network-level knowledge-sharing processes at least partially explain the relative productivity advantages enjoyed by Toyota and its Suppliers”. As the demand for services soar, the pace at which product, solution or service development is required is also changing rapidly. Innovation therefore is key to providing such differentiation.
Kickstarting Innovation in organizations in such a scenario therefore is a key question: and has been at the core of research in technology, management, leadership, and cultural space. As workplaces become more and more agile and dynamic and specially in the times, we all live today, it is important to look at some of the levers that kick-start innovation culture. The influence of organization culture, and several aspects of organization’s vision, processes, team collaboration & trust apparently have a role to play in organization’s innovation potential. However, this relationship requires further strengthening, to establish clear and precise linkages with different aspects of organization’s culture (viz. structure, processes, systems, leadership, risk taking et al), the task & work clarity and willingness of people to share resources & collaborate.
In context of a client engagement, where we needed to work on kickstarting a global innovation culture, we research to draw a better understanding of that relationship, both for our client to create an innovation culture and draw a clearer linkage of the innovation levers in the organization, their relationships, and their inter-connections, that helps professionals who often must achieve similar results in their respective organizations.
Based on our research we observed, innovation is enhanced in the organization where in addition to clear vision, there is a higher propensity of process clarity, task clarity, team collaboration and an environment of sharing knowledge and resources. Further organization must come across to its’ people as a sustainable and long-term focused and working towards sustained outcomes rather than short-term fixes. This is the paradox of innovation and agility – it sustains in a more stable ecosystem and environment. Another dimension, that is important to look at organization’s sustainable innovation practice is to reduce team dis-union and disharmony, whose absence is a critical factor in kickstarting innovation. The findings of our study have important postulations on the way innovation be kick-started at the ground level as it interweaves, process and task clarity in the context of innovation that have hitherto remained less connected to innovation.
Summarizing in brief, meaningful Innovation is influenced by the factor of pull created by the vision of the organization and its ability to sustain its purpose over a long period of time. The second aspect is the culture that provides enough push to individual’s mental faculties by making available the resources through collaboration and seamless framework for sharing embedded in process-driven environment with lesser value-added activities and clearly outlined tasks that provide the individual enough bandwidth to think on development.
Our study thus brings forth actionable and implementable factors that influence innovation on a day-to-day basis and simple practices that help organizations create a climate for meaningful innovation. Innovation practices are directly influenced by the components of culture that an institution has, as also on the team level management practices. Meaningful Innovation thus requires the organization to address, conditions for an individual in an immediate team environment as well as through the organization at large that facilitate ideation, collaboration on the idea and taking ideas to implementation through collaborative working. Essentially it is about bringing individual’s creativity to action by creating a conducive organization climate for thinking, ideating, and implementing ideas.
