Like it or not, the business landscape is changing through innovation and digital modernization. Cashless arenas, curb-side shopping, contactless payments, and food delivery services are all examples of business innovation fueled by digital modernization and modern technology solutions. To be honest, this list only scratches the surface of innovative ideas businesses use today.

Whether your organization has a formal innovation discipline or rolls with the “idea of the day,” without innovation, the organization may struggle to stay relevant in the coming years. According to Jackie Fenn of Gartner, innovation is so important that the need for sustainable, repeatable innovation will drive most organizations to establish innovation as a formal business discipline [1]. For example, creating the role of Chief Innovation Officer.

My experience as a technology leader leads me to agree with Fenn’s statement. While I have yet to work with an organization that possesses a formal innovation discipline, I can attest that organizations with an informal innovation focus are less likely to receive the business value it needs to thrive in the future. In my previous blog post, “Leading Innovation,” I highlighted a company’s use of a “10% time” concept where team members must spend 10% of their time a week working on innovative initiatives [2]. While the organization’s senior leadership applied excellent rules to the concept, such as employees not needing to seek management approval and appeal to the CIO if the employee is not able to dedicate 10% of their time to innovation [2], I have found that unplanned work, technical emergencies, and shifting priorities often trump informal innovation efforts making them less impactful compared to a formal innovation discipline.

In Fenn’s article “Meeting the Information Needs of the Chief Innovation Officer in 2023,” Fenn describes several concepts to help drive a formal innovation discipline within an organization. Her advice includes [1]:

• don’t start an innovation discipline from scratch; adopt and adapt best practices;
• consider a broader management attitude toward innovation, such as the following the Innovation Management Hype Cycle (Figure 1);
• consider open innovation, crowdsourcing, and shared risk models;
• partner with people outside of the organization;
• use algorithmic approaches to drive performance improvements;
• maintain an information repository of innovation projects/activities, and use them to begin the migration to statistical innovation management;
• maintain a list of high-impact technologies and ideas;
• document key opportunities and challenges;
• host regular events to compare opportunities and challenges with technologies and ideas;
• use a value game board(i) (Figure 2);

In conclusion, the business landscape as we know it is changing as we progress into the Information Age. Whether your organization sets aside dedicated innovation time for employees or has established an innovation discipline led by a Chief Innovation Officer, some level of innovation dedication is needed to stay relevant in today’s business landscape; however, organizations are likely to realize more business value from a formal innovation discipline.

Figure 1. Innovation Management Hype Cycle [1]

Figure 2. Example Game Board by Veracity Solutions [3]

Works Cited

[1] J. Fenn, Meeting the information needs of the Chief Innovation Officer in 2023, Gartner, Inc., 2012.

[2] A. J. Arduini, “Leading Innovation,” 19 November 2022. [Online]. Available: https://sites.psu.edu/aja6921/2022/11/19/leading-innovation/. [Accessed 20 November 2022].

[3] Veracity Solutions, “Introducing the Veracity Gameboard,” [Online]. Available: https://www.veracitysolutions.com/blog/introducing-the-veracity-gameboard. [Accessed 20 November 2022].

[4] Gartner, Inc., “Value Game Board,” Gartner, Inc., 23 August 2013. [Online]. Available: https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3900583. [Accessed 20 November 2022].

End Notes

[i] Value Game Board: companion tool to the Estimate and Compare Value of New Solution document. Initiate a healthy conversation with business partners on goals and value drivers, compare projects-side-by-side on agreed upon importance weights, and dissect the impact on various stakeholder groups [4].