“Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results” - Albert Einstein
The transparent world is based on the concept of an easy flow and exchange of ideas, objects, people, etc. High transparency levels imply low friction in this activity and increased innovation.
In a previous post, a Transparent World, properties of our increasingly transparent world were discussed, but what does it mean for modern companies? To give a full answer to this question, there are certain topics that should be covered, including the following:
- Use of a special Internet-based collaboration platform to establish value-creating and transparent companies;
- Use of Value-Creation Playbook with a focus on clients;
- Global work with the best talents both outside and inside an enterprise.
Most Challenging Period
The modern global innovation economy gives a number of major opportunities with growing and big markets. However, this period is quite challenging as technologies keep improving at fast rates while the global competition stays fierce. It’s very difficult to adapt to the speed of the modern market. That’s why the standard lifetime of many enterprises is less than 10 years. They will keep going away if new transformational innovations don’t evolve.
Just becoming larger and more efficient is eventually a losing strategy.
The new normal is the term that refers to poor economic results in the US. This pessimistic conclusion is reminiscent of Albert Einstein’s observation,
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
New and valuable innovations should be created by companies fast and effectively, but how many of them have the sense of urgency in terms of improvements?
Value-Creation Playbook Importance
The modern world brings a number of major opportunities. Besides, many enterprises have excellent financial and human assets. In practice, they normally don’t lack them. As an example, think of Nokia and Kodak. These companies possessed great assets, but they lacked the ability to innovate (the most important one).
The main reason for bad or insufficient results is that companies have ineffective or non-existent value-creation methodologies. For instance, ask middle-level managers to give a description of a Value-Creation Playbook. If they can’t do that or ask you what your query means, they don’t have it. It’s a consistent experience across the globe. There’s an immense potential to improve the performance because only a few enterprises have efficient innovation processes and strategies.
The Value-Creation Playbook of any company describes the skills, talents, processes, knowledge, and human resources its employees must have to become successful innovators. The most valuable innovations result from the convergence of different knowledge forms. When it comes to multidisciplinary teams, every discipline should be defined by unique concepts, words, and business models. Bad results should be expected if a common language isn’t in place.
Value Proposition
The main function of any enterprise is to create a large customer base. It means that its concepts and common language must be based on customers’ needs. The definition of the “value proposition” is a great example. It’s the main framework for all kinds of value-creation activities. In reality, only a few enterprises use common definitions, and the results of confusion are stunning. The best definition for any value proposition includes the following:
- The customer and market Needs;
- The Approach for business models and solutions;
- The Benefits/costs from the solutions;
- The Competition and existing alternatives. (i.e., NABC)
Value-Creation Forums
Value-creation is about learning and creating — fast.
It’s necessary to remove all the actions that slow it down, while the ones that speed it up should be embraced. For instance, those barriers that limit access to data and people should be eliminated. In many cases, even basic consulting with the personnel across the company is discouraged.
The use of special value-creation forums is the best way to eliminate all kinds of organizational barriers and increase value creation and learning. They are recurring meetings that bring all team members together to learn from one another and present interesting value propositions. These forums are an important part of the Value-Creation Playbook of any company. Other concepts include:
- Determining a few insights that prevent solutions;
- Finding excellent opportunities;
- Ascertaining potential customer pain points;
- Developing company-wide metrics for success;
- Incentivizing success;
- Encouraging all positive behaviors.
The greatest benefit of their usage is that they help enterprises sort out the initiatives that are important only to a few members from the ones that are essential to the whole company. It’s a certain framework that should be used to evaluate all projects. It’s necessary to eliminate all kinds of unimportant and not interesting activities. It’s even more essential to ensure that the company is focused only on major opportunities. This issue is becoming more and more critical in the global economy for different reasons:
- There are multiple major opportunities, so there’s no excuse for failing to address them;
- Intense competition turns minor innovations quickly irrelevant.
Key Attributes of Collaboration Platforms
As described in the article about the transparent world, the company needs to use state-of-art web-based collaboration tools and platforms to increase its innovative potential. Any platform of this kind must possess a few important attributes:
- Allow all contributions as required from all appropriate staff and outside partners;
- Enable asynchronous and synchronous collaboration throughout the company;
- Use a Value-Creation Playbook to spread value-creation across the company.
All major companies work globally with sales, R&D, and other resources at strategic locations. The biggest companies can have R&D centers at 5 to 10 sites around the world. It’s important to understand local markets and working directly with clients to give them competitive solutions. However, it also creates difficult challenges, and one of the biggest ones is to figure out how to find the right people for a specific project. The company can have talents to solve any possible problem that arises, but only if they are engaged. Today they are not.
Asynchronous and synchronous collaboration matters a lot because people usually work in different time zones. Besides, collaboration platforms make it simple to subtract and add outside partners and employees when needed. The value creation speed is increased when companies have access to the best talents when specific problems must be solved. It’s an effective mechanism for the implementation of “open innovations” proactively across the company.
If the Value-Creation Playbook is integrated into collaboration platforms, all people in the enterprise learn the essentials and basics of value creation. All company functions usually require different knowledge levels. However, all people in the company must use and understand the basics, such as NABC value propositions. Their use across the company means that all conversations start with customer needs, as it must. That one factor completely changes how the company performs.
Collaboration platforms are crucial tools to make both the world and the enterprise transparent. They also offer an effective tool to train employees to use the best innovation practices. In its turn, this is what creates a highly competitive and positive environment because teamwork products are available to management and every team member.
Different measurement tools of these platforms give feedback on who the best expert in a specific area is and who is participating. They allow for asynchronous collaboration, and that’s why collaboration platforms are very valuable tools to unleash a creative potential of all introverts who are diminished in face-to-face meetings.
Company members benefit from this type of value creation and collaboration because it allows them all to develop new and important skills fast. They realize that their ongoing learning and becoming more skilled play a big role in success these days. In this environment highly trained professionals self-motivate themselves more than can management.
The good news is that innovative collaboration platforms provide these essential capabilities. As outlined in the article about the transparent world, people will soon observe a range of advanced AI services and tools that will make these platforms even more effective and beneficial. Nowadays, they’re like the first computers that have only several basic apps and programs. In the nearest future, there will be hundreds and thousands of these services and applications designed to assist in the value creation process.
Are you familiar with the Kaggle airplane planning competition? As in this example, those companies that can rapidly assemble superb teams from within and without the company to solve important problems, and then rapidly drive them forward using best practices will have a profound competitive advantage in the global innovation economy. All of these developments and innovations will result in a revolution in working practices, just like the TQM movement in the middle of the 20th century.
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