Innovation & Creation

Innovation is no more than a platitude; everyone is talking about it every day. Why it is rare to find companies who continuously develop competitive advantages by enhancing creativity? We have found six reasons behind it.

1. Business leaders believe innovation is less important than surviving. No matter how ambitious the teams were in the beginning of a creativity journey, they eventually would give in to the reality due to facing unexpected difficulties.

2. They are just copycats instead of true innovators. They want to duplicate a successful case in their contexts and expect to see fancy results.

3. Innovators do not have a clearly defined strategy. They believe they can do anything with their courage and passion. 

4. Innovators are not professional and lack of learning. They do not have proper tools, and only stick with what they have already known.

5. Innovators are isolated in the organization. They do not have sufficient influence on the majority. Innovation has not been a highlight in the organization. 

6. There is a common paradox that business leaders expect innovative outcomes but have a fear to manage innovators well in the future.

We found in our research that innovation could become a powerhouse of developing brand-new competitive advantage if it is deeply and widely rooted in the organization as a day-to-day focus. We call it innovation integration and normalization, which can only be realized by synergizing culture, structure, tools and capabilities.  

A stand-alone opportunity of innovation can activate the on-going journey of innovation integration and normalization inside an organization. We help business leaders choose or create an opportunity, set the objectives and design the road-map of the journey. Project teams will be built after completing the diagnosis on objectives and road-map as well as the mapping on pros and cons in the field of innovation and creation. We also will design the innovation tools and develop creativity capabilities along the process. The project team will start to perform afterwards and will not stop until the day they achieve those objectives.

The outcomes achieved by capitalizing on an occasional opportunity can be leveraged as the first step of developing innovation infrastructure and culture as well as forming more similar projects teams that can bring in sufficient internal disruption in all the key performance areas that look for innovation. Ultimately, project-based innovation can cultivate new competencies and advantages on a regular basis.