On Innovation Challenge: Why company struggle in leading innovation

During Summer 2019, Bukalapak sent me to Florence, Italy to attend the Front End Innovation Conference. The main reason for the conference held in this city because Florence is the heart of innovations and produce many leading innovators, one of them is Leonardo Da Vinci. An Italian polymath of the Renaissance whose areas of interest included invention, drawing, painting, sculpting, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, writing, history, and cartography.

500 years after Leonardo Da Vinci, his view on innovation main drivers remained the same: Observation, curiosity, experimentation, connection, and relationship.

I can say that innovation is a ‘tailored’ or modernised word for “adaptation skill”. You need to innovate to survive, period.

Undoubtedly, an innovative company generate more profit, increase stock values, and create more job opportunities by producing a new field of work.

In order to produce innovation that ‘sells’, many research procedures had been developed to map out innovation.

However, being innovative is not merely about research techniques, methods, and experiments. As per what Da Vinci believed, innovation is also about building connection and relationship.

And here where I learned that innovation is beyond great research methodology, it is also required human interactions within the process.

So, the stories on how connection and relationship brought to life in the business had become the main topic shared during the conference.

Andrea Bozzoli, CEO HPE COXA as one of the speakers in the conference believed that continued cooperation within all functions inside the company as well as external parties are essential to drive growth from innovation. He shared how his company succeeds in drive innovation by having a mutual relationship with universities in doing research and experiments. University students might benefit more experiences to do research by the funding support from his company, while the company itself can optimize the cost of the research.

The collaboration with the external party has also been done by Bukalapak in some areas. The latest collaboration we did is with Pemerintah Provinsi Jawa Barat with E-samsat Jabar, to create vehicle tax payment features. Both parties can generate value from this innovation as we make it easier for people to pay tax while at the same time reduce the barrier for the government to pull money from the citizen.

Aside from collaboration with an external party, be it university or government, intensify the connection within people inside the organization is imperative.

In most cases, some companies tried to launch a new product innovation where product R&D worked in isolation and not collaborate with other departments within the process. Innovation is not a job for research teamwork in a corner, it also involves many people from across departments inside the organization working together since the very beginning.

As the main objective of innovation is to translate ideas into a product that really benefit consumers, hence, it is essential for a company to focus on collaboration amongst people or expertise across divisions to create streams of new products and services. Researchers, engineers, designers, marketers and other key players are required to join the ideation process.

The biggest failure of innovation is started when we create a product or service which doesn’t understand customer needs. But, how do we understand what customer needs?

Professor Deborah Dougherty in her research on innovation management said that every employee in each department has their own understanding of customer needs but the knowledge is partial- just a piece of the puzzle of knowledge. Engineers understand the feasibility of the products, marketers understand if it really has potential value in business and how to sell it, researchers and designers understand how the product potentially fit customers life, and so on. So the challenge would be on how to manage this multifunctional teamwork together in phases started from defining, designing, and developing and launching new products. Her research shows that innovation is a multifunctional team sport, period. It is not suggested to do it in sequential phase, handling one phase to another.

The case study on this shared by Amrutha Varshini, VP of Innovation Practice Area Lead of Citibank on how her company develops better synergy to drive innovation during the FEI Europe 2019 conference. As driving innovation in an established bank has its own struggle due to long bureaucracy and regulations, one of the ways to solve this issue is by building “innovation community” inside the company. This community consists of an employee who has ‘innovator spirit’, not only a researcher but also some people across disciplines. The main objective of the innovation community is to cultivate ideas across functions to be discussed, added, improved, criticized by other members of the community. The expected output of this community is to have early idea curation by involving as many points of view as possible to increase its probability to succeed and reduce its probability of failure in the market. By building this community, the innovation was driven from down to top management more effectively.

Other examples in creating synergy inside the organization were done by Innovation Team for Volkswagen. They said during the FEI 2019 conference, that innovation inside Volkswagen finally happened right after they hire someone titled Innovation Manager. His role and responsibility are to recruit the right people from cross-functional division inside the company and ensure the collaboration happen since in the early stage. Aside from that, he is also responsible to be the innovation idea spokesperson at the management level.

As an organization who relied on innovation, technology company shall start implementing an innovation management strategy to contribute better for customers life.