Harnessing the power of co-creation
Creating a culture of innovation is vital. A business will always struggle to innovate unless it is willing to experiment and to refine ideas, which often means changing mindsets is key to embracing transformation.
Innovation isn’t just about the tools a business uses, but about the journey, as well as new ways of thinking, experimenting and working. It is about co-creation with your customers, partners and peers.
Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen claims that 95% of all product innovations fail. That’s because a desire to innovate is no substitute for building a culture of innovation.
A better approach relies on bringing cultural transformation to your business in a way that enhances efficiency and transforms your digital future.
Racing to innovate
The journey to innovation needs to be fast in a world of change and disruption. Realizing the innovation potential relies on a new way of working, based on collaboration. Cooperating across the business internally – and with expert partners externally – is key to achieving innovation goals, which means shifting mindsets to deliver new solutions.
If your business lacks the ability or the tools to innovate at pace, it will be difficult to keep up with increased competition and emerging technologies. You will also face challenges when it comes to anticipating and responding to customer demands. Beyond new technologies, businesses need to rethink and transform how they operate, which means being agile and moving fast.
Innovation as usual
Innovation is not something an organization can do from time to time. It is not an appendix to an existing modus operandi. An innovative mindset and the search for innovation should be embedded into each and every function of a company and should be nurtured, sponsored and governed as a continuous program by the leadership team.
”Nobody is willing to pay for ‘innovation’. Individuals and organization are looking for alternative ways to deal with existing urgent needs that are either entirely unmet or are only being addressed with a suboptimal approach. This is what a culture of innovation is all about: finding challenges that are unworkable, unavoidable, urgent and underserved and applying innovation to solve them,” says Razvan Tapu, Chief Digital Officer, Stefanini EMEA.
The Stefanini approach – innovation through collaboration
Innovation with Stefanini involves building an ecosystem, facilitating a co-creation approach with startups, academia, experts, ventures and partners in order to deliver unique business value to our partners and customers.
Staying ahead of the game
Building bridges and breaking down silos allows for new ways of doing business. This new way of working will be transformative for many businesses and will be crucial to them gaining a competitive advantage.
How to manage innovation in an organization?
Transforming any organization is about rethinking every dimension: strategy, culture, governance and capabilities.
Innovation also relies on experimentation. Even when budgets are tight, businesses must be prepared to create an environment where every employee’s curiosity is encouraged, where data trumps opinion, and where anyone can lead a test, which might involve managers embracing a new leadership model.
Everyone in an organization needs to understand the value of a surprise, from leadership downwards. When firms adopt this mindset, curiosity will prevail, and people will see failures not as costly mistakes but as opportunities for learning.
Changing the culture and mindset for innovation
Innovation also depends on embedding collaboration and co-creation in the ecosystem – engaging all key players. Likewise, innovation labs can create spaces to facilitate collaboration and experimentation, supported by multidisciplinary teams who generate value though innovation.
“There are huge opportunities for transformation available to businesses through our co-creation approach, which combines businesses’ deep understanding of their own organization with our fresh perspective and unique experience to truly realize the power of innovation. Whether through workshops that explore your business transformation, and the role technology can play, to dives and deep dives that bring fast innovation to your enterprise and inspire leadership mindsets, a transformative competitive advantage is in reach through a co-creation approach,” concludes Razvan.
