Standing on one leg or two?

For today’s enterprises to thrive, they must have one foot firmly planted on their current “performance engine” of the present, and the other foot planted on their “innovation system” to build their future. How difficult it is to hop around on only one leg. Yet too often, this is actually the case; ignorance – - like the proverbial business ostrich with its head in the ground – - is preserved through emotional barriers at the highest levels of some unwitting companies.

Incremental innovation on current products is heralded and highly exalted as part of the strategic plan. But planning tends to be projecting the past forward and … it lightly underestimates how much shorter product life cycles have become in our ubiquitous economy. As plans fail to meet expectations, one-legged companies totter and eventually fall.

PLANNING MUST BE about future products and brand new “S-Curves” (product life cycles). Figures, time lines, and resource allocations is what planning used to be about. Now its just the starting point, and at that it must become dynamic (flexible & evolving, no longer fixed). Contingency planning requires the integration of new products & services, yet to be conceived & designed, into the budgeting process.

Innovation and its role within businesses is underappreciated and largely misunderstood, yet in this fast-moving world economy it is a primary factor in whether good fortune or bad follows corporate initiatives. Too little is understood about the process of innovation as it affects organizational and (increasingly shorter) product lifecycles. Many businesses need to shift to see innovation is more than technology – - to a wider scope of what it really is – - and how crucial it is to develop innovative capabilities. Organizations develop through stages into higher and higher levels of innovative performance. But there can be no development until there is a commitment to develop innovation as a core competency.

Real life innovation with its processes and systems only starts once an idea is obtained. This can be better understood by paralleling the concepts “quality” & “innovation”: both activities are not done off in a corner but are actually developed to be part of the company’s core competencies within the entire organizational fabric, forming a unique DNA. Having an R & D lab off in the corner isolated from the rest of the company just doesn’t work any more. Converting ideas into products that the market needs and demands is a cross-enterprise activity that in one way or another involves everybody. Yes, Gulp! It’s a big deal growing a second leg; innovation for the next product cycle is crucial to corporate stability.

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