Growth of Adaptive Enterprises in Driving Innovation for the Post-pandemic World
Organizations and enterprises have made significant contributions to humanity enhancement over the centuries, whether extending life spans, eliminating life-threatening diseases, making education available to all, and developing excellent products and services that improve life. But recently, the current pandemic has embraced more than a year of unprecedented change with a dramatic paradigm shift. In this pandemic period, the organizations need to sustain how they can constantly reinvent their businesses, keep growing and impact the way human society is structured.
This shift has changed the rules for nearly every organization, even the way they think about culture transformation and the pace at which they must learn to evolve leadership and management functions. All business leaders have experienced this shift, and they can no longer continue to operate according to old methods. And they must now embrace new ways of thinking about their organizations, culture, leadership, technologies, talent, and how they approach transformation.
Organizations and businesses grow, evolve, change, mature, and plunge over a period and are very similar to living entities that respond, react, and evolve concerning their surroundings. The survival and growth are entirely dependent upon the continuous adoption of the external and internal environment that keeps happening across multiple dimensions. According to a recent research commissioned by AWS, a new breed of adaptive enterprises has emerged from the pandemic that is more confident about responding to change and with a more agile, secure, resilient, and customer-centric approach. Figure 1 shows some critical insight from these adaptive enterprises across France, Germany, Israel, Spain, and the UK.
In this digital economy, leadership agility is vital for the longer sustainability, and hence organizations need leaders who could influence a complex and rapidly changing state. Current leaders need to build the required capabilities and skills to become more agile leaders, flexible enough to manage the changes, teams, and decisions in challenging situations. Rather than learning with certainty, the best opportunity rests with those who embrace learning uncertainty, which needs an agile mindset that empowers now and future generations to thrive in a rapidly shifting economy that shifts from one set of known experiences to another at a higher pace.
These attempts to help cope with the shifts in the market and business environments are mostly driven by transformations in an organization. When we consider a digital transformation, it is a constant re-alignment of business models, technologies, and organizational culture to more effectively do business in the digital age. But for many organizations, digital transformation is just a digital optimization in front, as new digital initiatives merely augment existing services.
The key to success is the right new technologies and the right mindset; still, organizations should start simply asking them the basic questions with an open-minded attitude to open a new world of opportunities and plan the coming journey. Managing these constant changes is a challenge for any organization. According to the Reinventing Without A Roadmap Survey, the way almost all business leaders navigated this successfully was by speeding up their digitization program — in particular, by investing in cloud computing technologies. Figure 2 captured some critical insights related to accelerating digital transformation:
The value of cloud deployment across enterprises is growing tremendously due to innovating quickly, scaling operations, and reducing infrastructure costs. Many enterprises saw immediate benefits in terms of flexibility, scalability, security, and cost, underlining just how much of an impact the pandemic had in encouraging companies to accelerate their digital transformation plans. All these gradually become crucial for the enterprises as there is no going back to the way things were before.
Today, organizations must innovative to deal with the ongoing uncertainty, including pandemics and the market shift due to many disruptions that are occurring. Many leaders are started feeling anxiety about the future, trying different ways, experimenting, and investing, but not all are surviving, and all these make a high degree of uncomfortableness. Innovation is always driven by attitude, and organizations must take a competitive advantage by reinventing themselves to sustain.
Going back to the Survey, we can see that the enterprises that have experimented and learned during the pandemic intend to keep doing so. They are now more resilient and better placed in the new competitive landscape. However, many organizations still need to address internal challenges and shift mindsets in order to thrive in this new era. Otherwise, those who do not embrace sustained reinvention and focus on innovation are at risk of being left behind. Figure 3 demonstrates the critical insights related to reinforcing innovation:
Generally, one could say that there are various obstacles to fostering an innovative culture, with the following ones being the most significant:
- Insufficient leadership support.
- Absence of an innovation strategy.
- Understanding of the right culture need for the creation.
- Non-engaging workforces.
There are simple measures to improve the culture of innovation within a company that can be easily implemented with a few hurdles only.
An innovative culture starts with a new way of thinking and the right mindsets since an innovative culture is really hard to implement. How organizations develop an innovation culture depends on the approaches needed for its innovation. Figure 4 shows the key factors that embrace an innovation culture within an adaptive enterprise.
The most crucial part of driving any innovation within an organization is to build an innovation strategy that sets the direction and framework for going forward, with clear expectations and goals and explicit communication across the organization. The importance of increasing speed to capitalize on new opportunities and start small, build fast, keep it simple, learn, and scale is the key for any innovation culture. On top of that, enterprises need both organizational and individual resilience as priorities and behaviors change.
The involvement of workforces from the beginning is necessary for creating a culture of innovation. Leaders need to communicate the right innovation strategy to the people, with a clear understanding of their responsibilities and expectations; psychological safety plays an important role here for an organization. One of the keys to psychological safety is that people feel comfortable voicing their opinions and not being judged.
Corporate venture establishments aim to fast-track the growth of startups through a complete alignment with the corporation’s mid to long-term strategy, scaling, innovating, attracting top talent, and fetching an entrepreneurial mindset for the team. Working time, budget, rewards, remunerations, technology trends, and broader ecosystem collaboration are other vital factors.
An innovation culture is undoubtedly making a massive difference in the way of thinking and working. This difference can build a serious need within the organization to encourage innovation and unleash people’s human capabilities with more creativity and a growth mindset. Leaders and their engagement play a vital role here, as insufficient leadership support is a critical barrier to creating a culture of innovation for any organization today. Adapting enterprises are creating a new spirit of innovation, which has accelerated transformation by years.
