How to implement innovation?

Posted by Sean Lew on Sunday, 7 December, 2008 under Collaboration, Innovation, Web 2.0 |

Innovation is the process of coming up with new ideas, products and process that will help an organisation perform better. Large organisations generates alot of ideas internally and compete on bringing many of these ideas to the market fast and cheap. With the era of M&As happening, innovation across different silos is getting very complicated. I have read a question a while back where someone asked why did Time Warner and AOL not come up with the iTunes concept post the merger. Its a great question and one that could possibly be due to the lack of innovation and cross departmental innovation. After all, one of the reasons for M&As is to harness the potential and intellectual capital in the other organisation.

Innovation at a departmental level will receive departmental results. Organisations need to look at new ideas and processes at an organisational level and understand the impacts of these ideas on other affected stakeholders. Organisations should also look at replicating the idea to other countries, region and product line – if applicable. I believe the best way to do it is to have a dedicated team to control the ideas coming from the organisation and pursue potential valuable ideas further.

So what is IT’s role in this? I have discussed about how social networking and collaboration previously and IT can enable innovation to happen smoothly across boundaries. IT should make it really easy for people to get to where they would like to go and allow the ideas to flow.

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