Since the era of Steve Jobs, business and organization has become aware of “innovation”. As consultant, we’ve seen management efforts to reach product/process/or business model innovation. To be realistic, most of them haven’t gain tangible results. Here are common challenges which organizations need to overcome for innovation success.
- Experience: In many cases experience is useful to achieve a certain result. For innovation, experiences sometimes block the idea we really need.
- Resources: Not intend to talk about budget, but to get applicable ideas, you will need to include different people from different expertise.
- Fail: Innovation takes time and normally starts from failure. Innovator can fail and should value each failure as precious lesson.
- Operation: There’s big different between small improvement you need to make for routine operation and innovation. Innovator should not satisfy with minor change.
- Execution: Innovation takes lots of contribution and time. People will resist to change or new thing but you should show your commitment and strong believe in it.
As a leader who contribute to organizational innovation. You should understand these challenges and encourage your team to overcome them.
Our key message
As a consultant, we have experienced some uniqueness of Thai organizations. They do not feel comfortable to work cross department, they respect seniority, they are good at routine tasks, and it’s not their nature to share different idea (follow the crowd they’ve been taught). Those cultures are totally opposite from innovation. There are many innovation approaches to talk about, for example, we can talk about how Steve Jobs came up with iPhone idea, framework to develop new business model, or we can talk about new product development processes. The fact is you cannot teach anyone to innovate just by studying Steve Jobs’s approaches. But, that’s not entirely true if you go deeper into his habits. Apart from iPhone, Steve Jobs was very well known about doing things perfectly, passion to create change or new things, and never hesitate to share his vision. So, why not start from changing staff’s habits and “Innovative Atmosphere”. This is how we define innovative atmosphere, “Where innovation is possible”. Thus, during this workshop, participant will learn what could have obstructed good ideas from employee and thus organizational innovation, and how can they remove those obstructions to make innovation possible.
How was the result?
In this project for Central Group, we select a very unique approach for this workshop “Lego Serious play”. For those who are not familiar with lego serious play, it is a method for sharing, brain storming, discussing by visualizing the idea into lego model. Participants were excited with the new approach and were introduced to challenging topics such as “How do you change business activities to match the change of consumer behavior?”, “What kind of new business or business model you would like to happen from Central Group in the future?” or “How do you contribute to create innovation in your organization?”. These series of questions are designed to encourage participant to think, share, and discuss step by step with guiding from facilitator what are the key messages they can learn from each question.
We are satisfied with the results, interesting idea such as retail business school, new concept of central department store, or personalized assistant application to let you enjoy shopping and be informed with interesting shop, product, promotion, or event at central department store. Personally, as one of the central department store regular visitor, I would like to see those ideas become reality in the future. As one of the content designer and facilitator, I hope this workshop brings you closer to innovation success.
