Innovation to Execution: The Hardest Step of All

Innovation is widely recognized as a core business capability, essential for protecting existing markets and establishing new ones. 

At the same time, the real purpose of innovation is so widely misunderstood, that it risks becoming ‘the thing that we do, when we don’t know what to do’. And yet it remains so widely respected that innovation has become the subject of corporate virtue-signalling – or even a distraction to divert attention from mediocre performance.

No conference is complete without a keynote from the chief innovation officer, and no office is complete without a brightly coloured digital innovation corner, complete with beanbags. In reality, the business of innovation is deadly serious, and critical to business survival. The true measure of innovation success is not how many new ideas you can generate, but how much traction you can achieve with those new ideas in your chosen markets.

This highlights a truth about innovation that is hidden in plain sight: new ideas are relatively easy to come up with, but getting the market to adopt them is infinitely harder. 

To explore the challenges of scaling innovations into production, teknowlogy Group has partnered with Fujitsu to look at specific examples of best practice. This will provide a source of guidance to organizations with validated innovation initiatives that they now wish to scale into production. The report also looks at specific examples of organizations that have embraced open innovation at scale, highlighting the benefits that a broader range of perspectives can bring.

Another whitepaper we created together with Fujitsu, that may be of interest to you:  “How Co-creation is Enabling a More Inclusive Workforce”