Topic- 1 Road to Innovation

I’m in the field of governance and I was reading one of the reading assignment articles titled “Unleash Innovation with good governance” which I could relate to instantly  because one of our roles as governance is to be the gate keepers for any disruptive changes or new technologies within the organization. In the article it had published the below figure:

I think this is a very practical approach to innovation based on my experience in the field because it manages the risk of failure and alignment of value to the organization while ensuring that the organization continuously aims to innovate. I believe there are two key elements to ensure the successful implementation of the framework as follows:

1. The Idea process- The is one of the key success factors and how to motivate your employees to continuously come up with innovative ideas. As witnessed first-hand, you can just put in a “digital box” for ideas and expect people to fill it up. This is from personal experience; I was excited to submit my ideas the first year of joining and after that I didn’t care much of making any submission and I believe this is a similar case for my peers as well. I believe organizations need to invest a little more in terms of time and effort for innovative ideas; this can be achieved through engagement with members from different departments.
2. The Steering Committee- This is one of the critical factors as well to ensure smoother journey for the ideas. I purposely stated “smoother” because I believe the idea journey goes through resistance at different levels; however, having a steering committee that is represented by different influential departments both business and IT can go a long way. This will ensure you gain the buy in needed to shape the ideas to fulfill the value needed. In addition, the steering committee will also support getting the support needed sometimes from a higher level management level (C-Level, Board).

Topic 2- The digital mindset vs traditional

This is one of the topics I believe many management roles should revisit every once in a while, because with the day-to-day operations we tend to lose the sense of being innovative and how we can shift our mindset to be innovative and motivate our peers and employees to continuously be motivated about the subject of innovation. I attended a 5-course session, and I could easily say that the below diagram was one of the key items I took out of the session. I thought there are many characteristics mentioned below that need the balance and would really help individuals to have the innovative mindset.

• The Tactician and the visionary are a very important characteristic to keep in mind, sometimes to be innovative in something you really need to have the technical knowledge while at the same time to have that visionary hat on to know what possibilities that could be achieved. This could be a challenge for some individuals, even leaders, and one of the alternatives to achieve this is to include those who are tacticians or are visionaries to the team.
• The analyst and the intuitionist- This is another critical characteristic of innovation to have because sometimes you must have the balance to proceeding forward without having all the “data” and to go with the guts which is of course based on experience.
• The power holder and sharer- this to be highly considered characteristic when it comes to innovation teams and empowering them to continuously develop new ideas.