Innovation; as Vijay Govindarajan, Professor at Tuck and co-author of 10 Rules for Strategic Innovators mentions in the interview below, is about 2 major things. First, you must accept things are changing and figure out how your organization can adapt. Second, change is not a technical problem its a people opportunity that is reflective of "mindsets". Therefore to enable your business to adapt you must introduce new mindsets. To create an innovation mindset, managers must bring in fresh voices from outside their company, encourage collaboration, and consider how emerging markets' needs can spur ideas for innovative offerings. Interesting - sort of chicken and egg. Leaders must first be open to realize they need to change - often they do not realize the need without having outsiders who stir up their thinking.
C.K. Prahalad, author of The New Age of Innovation, Driving Co-Created Value Through Global Networks, among other books, makes a very important observation in a recent interview. He says, " the competitive landscape is morphing...creating a new way of thinking. Current innovation literature is based largely on the legacy of the industrial age." In other words many leaders have not seen the opportunity of new innovation because they continue to define opportunity via vanished industrial paradigms. C.K. is right. In my experience most leadership creates the barriers to progress because they are too rooted in the past and therefore leaders can't see or understand the foundations of the future. The good news is that CK and his book addresses this and other issues to lay a foundation for how organization can change to focus on new solutions that indeed create value aligned with the modality of the new world.
His "one consumer at a time" by delivering personalized experience or as he terms it "N=1"; and his "R=G" concept, wherein an orchestration of resources from a wide variety of people and organizations are used to deliver value, are key concepts to adopt for creating value in our new world.
CK notes two shifts necessary to grasp the innovation oportunity. The first is the way we look at the world. Leadership must accept it is going to change. You have to have a point of view about the future when evaluating the present. You cannot anchor yourself in the past. The second needed shift is that leaders must come to terms with the dominant logic they have relied upon. to rid themselves of past logic in order to embrace the new.
Watch CK's Businessweek interviews below. These are insightful and helpful in understanding more about how businesses can adopt N=1 and R=G concepts to progress rapidly and effectively through innovation.
Monday, November 16, 2009 
