In-company continuing education
5 October 2023
Lenovys joins Tinexta and aims to grow in Italy and Europe
20 February 2024
There is a lot of talk about innovation as a key driver of growth, but never before has it been so easy to get its approach and implementation wrong.
Making available new products and services, hastily deemed innovative, or having digitized and automated pieces of the business, does not automatically mean having originated a real high-impact innovation that leaves a tangible and relevant mark on the market and on the company’s value growth.
Let’s have clarity. Companies must always have two “engines” accessed to stay in the air and travel safely.
The two engines of innovation in the enterprise
The first engine is that of the current business.
It is the one that must ensure the management and continuous improvement of current products and services, unceasingly adapting them to the new needs of the market and the company, making the design, development, production and sales systems increasinglỳ efficient.
The watchword for this first business engine is the Japanese term kaizen, incremental change.
The second engine is that ofhigh-impact innovation.
It is the one that has to think about the future of the company in discontinuous terms from what has been done so far. Products, services, business models, technologies, organizational arrangements that succeed in significantly growing the company, not necessarily on the same path traveled so far.
The buzzword here is the Japanese term kaikaku, radical change.
Keeping both engines accessible and well functioning is not easy because they have different forms of organization and governance, metrics, processes, and mindsets.
I would add a caveat: High-impact innovation is not something to be relegated to a specific function, while the vast majority of other people stay to “do the serious stuff.”
High-impact innovation must always be a multidisciplinary business game to be extended to all possible internal and external resources that can make a relevant contribution, and with a high energy level. Never a talk for an intimate few.
