With the pandemic and significant decline in revenues, executives know that they must innovate to survive these unprecedented times. But how? Many executives, however, have chosen to play it safe and secure, hunker down, and hoard cash. The problem with playing it safe is while you can cut costs to meet falling revenues, you can’t cut your way to growth. Innovation is needed for growth. The riskiest strategy is not to innovate. And the research is overwhelming, highly innovative companies lead their domains on financial measures.
In this Innovation Minds’ Spotlight Series, Bala Balasubramaniam, Chief Technical Officer and Founder of Innovation Minds, interviews C. Brooke Dobni, Ph.D. and Founder of InnovationOne®, LLC, and Victor Assad, Manager Partner of InnovationOne. Our insightful and far-ranging discussion covering the following topics:
- The strategic focus companies need to maintain simultaneously managing excellence to meet current commitments while at the same time empowering employees and external partners to innovate solutions aligned to the company’s innovation vision. This is the “secret sauce” of companies that manage to remain innovative in good and bad times.
- The “strategic shift” required for company strategic planning processes to make them nimble and action orientated. Secondly, to stop doubling down on products and services that will soon lose their value and instead invest in their best innovations. The shift is contextual by the company. For some companies, this may be incremental with a 10% shift in investment focus per year. For others, a more significant investment shift is needed. What is clear today is that we will not be going back to normal. The innovation leaders will reinvent normal in our ongoing pandemic and digital era.
- Break the “false narrative” that everyone has to be face-to-face, 24/7, in an office to be innovative. Research shows it just isn’t so. With 50 percent to 80 percent of employees currently working remotely, such as Google and Twitter, companies can augment their traditional processes for innovation, such as brainstorming by using video conferencing whiteboarding software, crowdsourcing, and collaborative project management software. Even before COVID19, every company needed to recognize it is a “digital company,” whether they are in the fast food industry, a retailer, or manufacturing firm.
- Learn the latest research by InnovationOne with The Conference Board. Our research shows the emerging trends of highly innovative companies, including the ongoing importance of making innovation a strategic imperative, nurturing transparent, collaborative, and fast-moving cultures of innovation, and the leading innovation methodologies and digital technologies.
- Learn why over 80% of digitization efforts fail.
- Learn the research that shows that highly innovative companies benefit from top quarter financial growth in their domains.
By clicking this link, you can listen or watch this informative interview.
Victor Assad is the CEO of Victor Assad Strategic Human Resources Consulting, managing partner of InnovationOne, and Sales Advisor to MeBeBot. He works with companies to transform HR, implement remote work, recruit executives, and to develop extraordinary leaders, teams, and cultures of innovation. He is the author of the highly acclaimed book, Hack Recruiting: the Best of Empirical Research, Method and Process, and Digitization. Subscribe to his weekly blogs at www.VictorHRConsultant.com.