I Ain’t Blue, I am Different: The Innovation Leadership Mindset

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Today’s C-suite is making a significant investment in new technologies.  Yet, it is failing to achieve full value. Technologies are being deployed in pockets or silos without a Strategy for scaling the Innovation from these technologies across the enterprise. Unable to scale their Innovation, organizations are not realizing the full benefits of their technology investments.

An Innovation Achievement Gap exists. What is the Innovation Achievement Gap? This is the difference between potential and realized value from technology investments. When new technology does not achieve its full value, the Innovation Achievement Gap exists.

What Companies are Facing Today

The enormous challenge of Innovation Management with legacy systems is facing companies today.  The conventional IT stack is not built or designed for the world of tomorrow. These are our software applications, data, hardware, telecommunications, facilities, and data centers.  Today’s cloud-oriented world is full of analytics.  There are sensors, mobile computing, AI, the Internet of Things (IoT), and billions of devices. Digital Transformation is changing the face ob business.

True, companies have started in the cloud. But the systems have not been adopted at the pace of technological change.  As a result, there are distinct Leaders and Laggards when it comes to the adoption and penetration of technologies. Leaders are seeing more than 2X the revenue growth of Laggards. Laggards, on the other hand, often adopt technologies as individual point solutions without a strategy for enabling systems than can achieve enterprise-wide, game-changing innovation. While they might have pockets of brilliance, Laggards cannot maximize the value achieved. To be a Leader is to have an Innovation Leadership Mindset.

Simply said, adopting technologies does not guarantee success. This requires a systematic and sequential strategy in line with Next-gen Enterprise Systems. This needs an Innovation Leadership Mindset.

Doing Things Differently: The Innovation Leadership Mindset

Leaders differ much from Laggards. Embedded within their whole being is the Innovation Leadership Mindset.

Having an Innovation Leadership Mindset is clicking the future into place. There are 4 core pillars of the Innovation Leadership Mindset.  Let’s define the first 2:

1. Invest in innovation. Leaders invest more in innovation. Organizations with Innovation Leadership Mindset direct a greater percentage of its IT budget toward innovation.  They accelerate investment innovation over the next 5 years. Leaders are far advanced from Laggards when it comes to investing in innovations. Leaders invest 93% on innovation and are expected to increase this to 97% in the next 5 years. On the other hand, laggards invest only 64% on innovation with a planned investment of 74% in the next 5 years.

2. Develop Innovation Systems. Leaders show a consistently higher rate of technology adoption.  Organizations with Innovation Leadership Mindset adopt new technologies earlier and develop higher levels of expertise. They prioritize and sequence implementation in optimal ways. Leaders have been found to adopt a fundamental general-purpose technology at a rate of 98%. An example of this is Artificial Intelligence. Laggards, on the other hand, have faith in a fast follower approach. They take technology haphazardly leading to patchwork across the organization.

There are 2 other core pillars that are equally important. One is Scale Technology Innovation and the other is Evolve Next-gen Enterprise Systems.  Leaders that set their sights on innovating at scale target 3 times more business processes with technologies. Leaders have also drummed up their resources towards building the Next-gen Enterprise Systems.

Next-gen Enterprise Systems are systems that are capable of repeatable and scalable innovations. It is Boundaryless, Adaptable, and Radically Human. Outpacing others calls for organizations to start envisioning their own version of Boundaryless, Adaptable, and Radically Human Next-gen Enterprise Systems.

Interested in gaining more understanding of the Innovation Leadership Mindset? You can learn more and download an editable PowerPoint about the Innovation Leadership Mindset here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

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To be competitive and sustain growth, we need to constantly develop new products, services, processes, technologies, and business models. In other words, we need to constantly innovate.

Ironically, the more we grow, the harder it becomes to innovate. Large organizations tend to be far better executors than they are innovators. To effectively manage the Innovation process, we need to master both the art and science of Innovation. Only then can we leverage Innovation as a Competitive Advantage, instead of viewing Innovation as a potential disruptive threat.

Learn about our Innovation Management Best Practice Frameworks here.