Innovative Organizations - Part 2

The success of running an Innovative organization is a balanced blend of culture, methodologies, infrastructure, and work practices.

Start with The Leadership

As the leader, your job is to shape the future of the company and guide it successfully through all stages of growth to achieve its maximum potential. This is achieved by creating a powerful sense of purpose and direction; aligning everyone with the company's mission, and values; developing yourself and others; motivating and communicating effectively, and developing an environment that motivates and empowers people to achieve extraordinary results. Think about the corporate future in disciplined ways and communicate your visions to your managers and employees.

Top Management Team

Each team member has responsibilities in functional areas but cross-functional systemic innovation must also be supported. Together the top team must share the leadership of the company with the team(s). They must understand and embrace corporate vision andstrategic intent, understand how their roles and functions are integrated, and coordinate their activities to support growth and opportunities-driven business development. Together, they must develop the company's growth goals and plans, develop and strengthen the corporate values and culture, attract and retain awesome people in each of their functional areas. To achieve that, you should build a sense of informality, trust, and a shared understanding of the future among the top management team members. The top team must be a model for all other teams and help each other succeed.

Cross-Functional Teams Leading Innovation

In the new era of systemic innovation, it is more important for an organization to be cross-functionally excellent than functionally excellent. To lead these expertise development efforts, cross-functional teams, either formal or informal, need to be formed. These teams can also find new businesses in white spaces between existing business units.

In strategic innovation road-mapping, the starting point for knowledge building and learning about the innovation concept is to establish a shared view of trends, disruptive technologies and other discontinuities, and related events that could shape the future. Organize regular meetings of multi-disciplinary teams to discuss explicitly - and if required, redefine - innovation objectives, priorities, and specific projects.

Culture and Climate

Culture is the environment that attracts great people and enables them to thrive and perform at their best.
Establishing the culture of innovation requires a broad and sustained effort. Though changing a company's culture is never easy, with the right leadership, cultures can be reshaped and amazing results can accrue. Establishing an attitude of relentless growth is what enables an organization and its people to achieve their goals. The spirit of relentless growth keeps fresh ideas flowing and reinvigorates the company.

The great innovators behave illogically. They base their work on uncertainty and ambiguity, experiment, use small teams, and draw their aspiration from forward-looking customers. Management's task is to generate the right climate that encourages experimentation, creativity, rule-breaking, and individualism. Avoid rigid management that rules out experiment and trial and error. Build learning and coaching organization - tear down cultures of bureaucracy, interference, and lack of autonomy.

Use various organizational mechanisms to get idea generators out of standard routines and connect them to both internal and external sources of knowledgebase. These mechanisms may include think-tanks, technology forecasting, strategic road-mapping, cross-functional strategic planning teams, corporate wide requests for new project proposals, periodic transfer of employees from one unit to another, and forums geared to cross-pollination of innovative ideas

Innovative Systems

The Innovation System model synthesizes and defines the core elements of innovation, their behavior and interaction. The power of this good model makes it easier to understand complex issues and dynamics of innovation, separate its six core elements - leadership & management, strategic alignment, innovation process, organization & people, metrics, and corporate culture - and examine them is greater depth.