Digital Innovation
Navigating disruption
IN A NEW WORLD
OF WORK
Technology, globalisation and societal shifts mean businesses are
grappling with unprecedented change. How can you ensure your
business is equipped to deal with the unexpected?
T
External imperatives
for innovation
here are all sorts of good reasons for
innovating – that is, for doing things
differently – and they fall into two fairly
distinct categories: internal and external.
This includes some factors that are far from
inevitable and cannot include those that are simply
unknowable:
Internal imperatives
for innovation
Over time, most businesses will need to change,
which is likely to involve one of the following:
1
2
3
4
I nnovation for growth – most new or growing
businesses offer a novel proposition
Innovation as a consequence of growth – it’s
simply not possible to carry on as before as an
enterprise expands; something has to change
Innovation to maintain/increase competitive
edge – the quest to stay ahead of the game
I nnovation to combat business fade – if
you do nothing then the original contribution
to your business will dwindle as time goes on;
your products and services will be copied; your
technology will wear out; your patents will
lapse; so there will be times when you have to
innovate just to stand still.
Paul
Kirkham
Researcher,
Nottingham
University
Business
School
nottingham.ac.uk/
business
All these relate to the internal dynamic of the
business – sometimes called the “lifetime”. And
it’s a fact that an enterprise tends to become less
innovative as it gets better at delivering its value
proposition. For many a business, the greatest
innovation challenge of all is to keep its early
entrepreneurial spirit alive.
“For many a business, the greatest innovation
challenge of all is to keep its early
entrepreneurial spirit alive”
1. Competition 7. New markets
2. New technology 8. Booms and busts
– unexpected
changes in the
economic cycle
3. New discoveries
4. New regulations
5. New fashions
6. New trends
9. International
factors – wars and
natural disasters
The main difference between internal and
external imperatives is that the former are largely
predictable and the latter, by their very nature,
are not. We can make forecasts, but we cannot be
certain; and some disruptions just can’t be foreseen.
So internal imperatives can be planned for, as
part of normal business practice, but an innovation
strategy needs to be flexible enough to deal with the
unexpected. It’s here that fashionable attributes
such as resilience and agility actually begin to mean
something, because the internal and the external
need to be tackled differently.
The ability to recognise why particular initiatives
are necessary is highly important – not just to managers
but to the managed. It addresses the twin threats
of initiative overload and lazy rhetoric and guards
against new brooms and old dogs alike. Above all, it
bridges the gap between theory and practice and takes
us beyond the buzzword. The bottom line is that there
are plenty of good reasons to innovate: it’s trying to do
it without understanding precisely why that gets us
into trouble.
Issue 2 - 2017
53