PORTFOLIO APPROACH TO MANAGE INNOVATION

Portfolio is nothing but initiatives that the organization takes to build new products/ services or to bring a difference in the services it gives to its customers. The initiatives should be compared across dimensions such as stretch, strategic fit, risk, and potential return and resource requirements. By using different charts as lenses to compare initiatives, you can mix and match alternatives until you come up with the portfolio that's right for you.



There are four reasons why the organizations should use the portfolio approach to manage innovation

1.Risk Management :The portfolio is a risk management tool. If the organization have more innovation initiatives under way than traditional firms, and it is prone to stretch farther within each initiative, without an overall view of its innovation efforts, it could easily wind up taking too much or too little risk.

2.Visibility: The portfolio provides visibility that allows the organization's firm pace the introduction of new products and services. The organization should balance the introduction of revolutionary products with incremental improvements in others so as to maintain a steady flow. By having a comprehensive view of initiatives over time, it can avoid either overwhelming or underwhelming the marketplace.

3.Timing of New Initiatives: The innovation portfolio will time when the organization start a new initiative or transfer a completed one into manufacturing or the marketplace.

4.Discovering Synergies: The portfolio illuminates potential leverage opportunities among technologies, processes, products, and markets. This capability will enable your firm to get more for each innovation dollar while reducing development cost and risk, reduce complexity and free up people to work on tasks that generate greater customer value.


Source:100 ADVICE

Can we have too much KNOWLEDGE???

When it comes to Knowledge Management, too much knowledge can prove even more dangerous than having just a little if you want to share ideas.

Why is it that the more we know about something, the harder we find it to explain what we know to other people? Research evidence suggests that our difficulties aren’t caused by the amount and complexity of our knowledge but by our inability to accurately judge just how much other people already know.

In other words, we make life difficult for ourselves because we’re not very good at working out what goes on in other people’s heads. And, because the content of our own mind is the only reference point we have for understanding other people’s minds, we often struggle to appreciate just how different other minds can be from ours.

Bridging the knowledge gap

The solution is to create a metaphor that will make it easier for your listeners to make the journey from familiar territory (what they already know) to unfamiliar territory (what they don’t know). Thinking metaphorically forces us to take a step back from what we know and imagine seeing it from someone else’s point of view. This is because metaphors are created by answering the question, “What’s it like?”

However, when we know a lot about something we often find ourselves resisting this question because we’re worried that any answer to it will be simplistic and inaccurate. We are so in love with the detail and subtlety of what we know, we can’t stand the thought of misrepresenting it. When it comes to expertise, it’s often a case of all or nothing.

For example, there was a time when computers were the exclusive domain of experts who communicated with each other in the mysterious language of computer code. The great breakthrough in the design and popularity of the personal computer happened when the metaphor of the desktop replaced the barren landscape of the command line. Instead of being lost in an abstract world of code, the home user now found themselves in a familiar office environment surrounded by documents, paper folders, filing cabinets and wastepaper bins – a place where they could do business.

The desktop/office metaphor may have many inadequacies (for example, seeing a word processor as a typewriter wouldn’t lead a new user to look for a replace command) but without it, the computer revolution might never have happened.

Many computer experts doing innovative work today started life on the desktop and eventually burrowed their way down to the creative power of the code beneath it. Once we have a map of the unfamiliar territory and a feeling for it, we’re ready to revise our mental models and start making sense of the technical details. At this stage, we can hear the tune in all its glory – and we can even hum it ourselves.

- An article by Martin Shovel. Source:Knowledgeboard

Principles of CHANGE Management

Two to three decades back, probably, Stability was a major goal for most of the organizations and shareholders expected nothing more than predictable earnings growth. But the scenario has changed drastically, market transparency, labor mobility, global capital flows, and instantaneous communications have blown that comfortable scenario and have forced the management of most of the organization to face a new challenge called “CHANGE“. Successful companies, as Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter in 1999, develop “a culture that just keeps moving all the time.”

This presents most senior executives with an unfamiliar challenge. In major transformations of large enterprises, they and their advisors conventionally focus their attention on devising the best strategic and tactical plans. But to succeed, they also must have an intimate understanding of the human side of change management — the alignment of the company’s culture, values, people, and behaviors — to encourage the desired results. Plans themselves do not capture value; value is realized only through the sustained, collective actions of the thousands — perhaps the tens of thousands — of employees who are responsible for designing, executing, and living with the changed environment.

Long-term structural transformation has four characteristics: scale (the change affects all or most of the organization), magnitude (it involves significant alterations of the status quo), duration (it lasts for months, if not years), and strategic importance. Yet companies will reap the rewards only when change occurs at the level of the individual employee.

No single methodology fits every company, but there is a set of practices, tools, and techniques that can be adapted to a variety of situations. What follows is a list of guiding principles for change management. Using these as a systematic, comprehensive framework, executives can understand what to expect, how to manage their own personal change, and how to engage the entire organization in the process. The principles to cater CHANGE MANAGEMENT are listed below:

1. Address the “People Issues” systematically.

2. Embracing CHANGE should start at the Management level.

3.The Transformation programs should involve all different level of organizations.

4. Creation of a Vision Statement Document and articulation of a formal case for change.

5.Ownership by leaders willing to accept responsibility for making change.

6. Communicating the right message (Top to bottom) and Feedback.

7.Assessing the cultural landscape.

8.Prepare for the unexpected, assess the risks.

Interesting, I will write on these principles in detail in my next post on Change Management and let me know the feedback whether this post is gripping enough or not.