Clay Christensen defines three kinds of innovation:
Empowering Innovation: Transform a complicated and expensive product/solution into a simple and affordable one, with a wider market and reach.
Sustaining Innovation: Innovate to make an existing product or solution better, allowing companies to enjoy higher margins. (Most innovations fall in this category)
Efficiency Innovation: Reduce production, distribution, or deployment costs by introducing more efficient solutions for an existing product or solution.
About five months ago, when we launched Innoventures, we ran before we walked, or for that matter, even stood up. We started with a simple intent: disruption through innovation. The trouble was that it’s easy to get caught up in massively disruptive innovations, involving large concepts in Enterprise Software, including Big Data or The Internet Of Things. Looking back, we discounted the challenges or framework requirements for disruptive innovations.
So, we ran – stumbled – and now stand, holding on to a wall – as we identify the directions in which we walk.
One cannot undermine the value of defining the need – why are we innovating at this moment in time? As we go back to our innovation quadrant, we are working on the process of innovating in the left hand quadrants, while building a system to deliver on inconceivable innovations in the future.
Defining needs sounds so simple. But, it is in fact a daunting and time-consuming process. While on one hand, everyone within the organization can describe a ‘major’ problem, it is another challenge to sort through a disparate list of challenges to identify meaningful, solvable, actionable, or impactful deficiencies.
Innoventures now works with a group of mentors and thought leaders. Our thought leaders are in direct contact with operations, sales, and customers, and have a general pulse of the company. Through them, we feel the directions of the wind and steer the direction in which we walk. We hear stories of success, failure, new solutions, challenges across delivery and operations – and we decipher and decode to hone in on what constitutes as solvable problems or opportunities.
Of course, ideas will come from associates. The difference is that now, before reaching our associates, we have a defined need. In our top-down-bottom-up approach (define needs through senior management and innovate through associates across the firm), we hope to create real disruption within Softtek. We are challenging our processes, technologies, and existing systems with the opportunities to innovate across the organization. All our associates, from the various departments, are invited and encouraged to contribute and innovate.
We have to remember that we can only be so effective in defining needs. The unidentified-needs, that which we have not and perhaps cannot realize, may lie completely outside our immediate areas of focus. The process of organizing innovation balances the act of defining needs while remaining open to unchartered mutations and introductions of new products and services. However, from our experience, we now value the importance of structure and definition of purpose.
One day, we shall chase empowerment. We, at Softtek, believe that very soon software will in fact eat up the IT services industry. In order words, services will quickly be replaced by software. Internally, we have pinpointed areas of how our innovations in software will in fact eat up the IT services industry. But, we have a ways to go…
