India is a large country with more than 1.3 billion people. Healthcare that balances access, affordability and quality care is always a challenge in a highly populated country. Innovative organizations and institutions have come together to create an ecosystem that brings balance between access, affordability and quality care, thus enabling disruption in healthcare.
Innovation is “transformation of an idea into reality”. It can be described as a change that adds value to the products or services that a firm provides to its consumer community, and fulfills their needs better than other alternatives. Innovation covers all the enablers - the process, the culture, and the ecosystem linkage - that helps in the generation of new ideas and their translation into products and services.
Innovation is about:
The essentials for innovation
Innovation is important in differentiating, and positioning, a firm for sustained success in an increasingly VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world.
Innovation requires companies to understand that it is important to have a wide spectrum of success/failure acceptance and associated culture in place. It is essential to acknowledge that things will fail at times, and firms must learn to ‘fail fast’ and quickly apply the lessons learned from those failures. The failures must not lead to “witch hunts”.
Organizations can sustain and accelerate innovation impact by insisting on information transparency. Information transparency can 2 The essentials for innovation be brought about by reporting on both successful and failed instances of innovation. There is a fair possibility that the failures in one part of the company are successful in another part of the company; thus information transparency may boost Innovative practices across the organization.
An essential skill for an organization is to link inventions with the core business. An organization can achieve such links via innovation. For instance, building a cross-platform, portable script execution solution is an invention. But, coupling the above solution with another mobile app, which offers a quality assurance solution to address the needs of universal communication vendors, is an innovation.
In other example, the invention - a supply chain management platform - is enhanced to accommodate the requirements of an agricultural equipment manufacturer. Thus, innovation improves the business applicability of an invention.
Inventions may have the potential to be successful innovations. However, for an organization to drive successful innovation practice, inventions are not necessary, as innovation can be brought in to apply to practices, delivery, processes, etc.
Inventions require niche skills which are specific (‘vertical’ skills - such as new technology) while Innovations require broader ‘horizontal/ lateral’ skills. Horizontal/lateral skills could be sociology, finance, marketing, business strategy - among others.
It is standard practice that innovation is limited to the R&D of an organization; however, an organization must spread its base not just across the organization but also across academic and vendor partners. The R&D organization needs to connect with the ecosystem to be relevant in the innovation ecosystem. Regular feedback from sales, delivery, potential user or customer, is essential to stay relevant (See Figure 1).
Figure 1: Innovation: The changing paradigm
How to measure innovation
Inventions are easy to measure since patents are clearly an internationally recognized yardstick. However, when it comes to Innovation, firms often struggle to quantify, and therefore it leads to losing out on the momentum of the innovation.
We can measure innovation by identifying the inputs for innovation and articulating the end goal i.e. defining the output.
Metrics of the innovation can be determined by defining the output:
Innovation: The three dimensions
Innovation within an organization encompasses its offerings, the combination of its offerings, managing talent, and how it markets itself.
Organizations should consider an innovation across three dimensions (See Figure 2)
A brief outline of some of the best practices for innovation are:
Innovation in offerings
Innovation in delivery
Figure 2: The three dimensions of Innovation in an organization
Innovation in engaging with the market
The way forward
Monetizing innovation practice or culture becomes inevitable at a stage when there are replicable cases of an innovation success story. Institutionalization of innovation practice or culture is necessary to take advantage, as an early mover, in the innovation game.
Saket Pandey - Consultant, MIT-Innovation & IP Wipro Ltd.
Saket is responsible for driving clients’ non-linear business growth through Wipro's products, platforms and solutions. He helps drive IT transformation encompassing Idea to Market, Market to Order, Order to Cash, and Digital platforms.
Santosh Rajnale - Consultant, MIT-Innovation & IP Wipro Ltd.
Santosh is an Innovation Consultant with expertise in Intellectual Property Management. He has also worked extensively in IP commercialization and Valuation.
David D ‘Lima - Vice President, MIT-Innovation & IP Wipro Ltd.
David is a globally experienced leader specializing in digital transformation for large enterprises. He helps them leverage the underlying platforms (cognitive/robotics, social/mobile, analytics, cloud) and enablers (collaborative innovation, service integration, on demand learning, global delivery of services) while making judicious choices on process, people, provider and platform options.