Driving Innovation through Digital Evolution Flywheels

Toon Herremans — Digital Evolution Strategist at Humain

Innovation, it is a topic that I’ve studied for many years now and I have seen all sort of flavours. The most important thing I’ve learned is that being innovative doesn’t mean you have to be a Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos. You don’t have to be a big ideas person. You don’t need to have the biggest lightbulb moment of your life. I will explain that there is more than one kind of innovation and that you might have the biggest impact on your company by focussing your energy on one type, the incremental innovation.

This blogpost is for everyone who has recently thought anything like the following:

· This seems too easy for me to spend my time on

· Why am I doing this task?

· Is this the best way to do this?

Let’s envision your brightest future and build for it.

What is innovation?

In a corporate environment we find two types of innovation:

· Radical innovation

· Incremental innovation

Radical innovation is often associated with high risk and high reward. Here we are looking for a blue ocean; a market share no one has tapped into, or an exciting new way to capture existing market share.

With incremental innovation we try to optimise existing processes and services to increase user experience, efficiency, and overall better performance. This is related to digital evolution* initiatives. Often companies are in pursuit of the next big thing and disrupting their industry. We believe that the path to being innovative is not by taking one big jump and find disruption, but to incrementally evolve to a culture where innovation is a core capability.

Incremental innovation can be driven by 3 things: technology, process, or people. Technology driven innovation is looking for use cases that can be solved with a certain new fancy technology. You can look at it like a hammer, searching for a nail to pound on. Process driven innovation is focusing solely on KPI’s where tech and people are in service of these KPI’s. In both these types, change fatigue will arise as people come last and they have to change their entire behaviour for either technology or process.

We firmly believe in the concept of people lead; technology follows and will always go for people driven innovation: focus on evolving the digital mindset throughout the organisation first and start with the user experience.

*Digital Evolution vs Digital Transformation: transformation indicates an end point while “digital” in this day and age is not stopping, it keeps evolving.

Spark an innovation culture

Culture is one of the main drivers to a successful, innovative organisation. People need to have purpose and be able to visualise why improvements should be made. All too often we see employees frightened by all the changes that are coming their way. “What if digital workers take my job?”, “I will have to correct this robot’s mistakes!”. Tackling these objections has been very difficult and we found that it is caused by introducing technology first and find use cases for this technology second. Let’s turn this around and start with the question “how can we make the lives of our colleagues much more enjoyable?” and map the necessary technology to these use cases. Participation will rise and the value is shown from the very beginning. To enable this culture shift, we’ve created a structured methodology: The Digital Innovation Flywheel.

Digital Innovation Flywheels

You can support the adoption of innovation in the entire organisation by starting small and incrementally grow in maturity through a continuous cycle of Observe, Orient, Decide and Act (Flywheel approach). It is a structured methodology to close the gap between people and technology and make people the main drivers of the change, instead of the technology. The flywheel enables you to go from context to concept & from concept to business impact.

Observe — Engage & Analyse

· Map out the current “as is” situation through Value Discovery tracks

· Get a clear view on people, process, and technology

Orient — Engage & Activate

· Gather all insights and propose (technical) solutions that make a difference for people & processes

Decide — Prioritize

· Decide on prioritization and what projects to implement

Act — Create & Measure Impact

· Implement and share successes

A flywheel will not start on its own. That is why we employ a three phased approach to get it started, and most of all, keep it turning.

• Vision: Change is a mindset, and it is our job to help you shift the mindset in the right direction. Start by creating a vision for what your company should look like in a couple of years. The fun part is, that you don’t have to be a CEO to do this. At any level you can create impact and achieve what you envisioned.

• Drivers: You will need some drivers to reach the vision you have set and humanise the technology so that nobody feels threatened by it.

• Momentum: Build momentum through small success with strategically well-chosen and well executed, well sequenced projects.

Any of these chapters can be laid out into much more detail. Let me know if any of this interests you and you would like to know more! I am happy to write more blogposts, or better yet, get in touch to discuss this in more detail.

Get the wheel turning and learn how Humain can help you do more of what matters on humain.ai.

Toon Herremans is Digital Evolution Strategist at Humain.