To be successful in today’s changing business environment with collective and energized value-creation, companies need to adopt a holistically innovative mindset, says Rajesh Aggarwal
We live in an age of fast-paced changes where organisations must strive for evolution and innovation. Revenue, profits, sales are necessary for a company’s growth, but what is crucial for it to stay relevant and in competition is the spirit of innovation. It includes organisational resilience — the organisation’s capability to anticipate and respond to incremental change and sudden disruptions to survive and thrive. It also implies that we recognise people’s innate capacity to adapt, create and innovate.
Geniuses like Steve Jobs took the world by storm using his innovative skills. Jobs experimented with different pursuits before starting Apple Computer with Steve Wozniak in 1976. Apple’s revolutionary products — iPod, iPhone and iPad, which have been dictating the evolution of modern technology, were nothing but the manifestations of an innovative mind.
Innovative companies attract creative employees who set in motion an environment of innovation. The fallout of this creative thinking — the satisfaction and the excitement of solving interesting problems, the sense of achievement, the thrill of collaboration, and the augmentation of skills, are all key ingredients to the kind of purpose-driven culture that fosters disruptive innovation.
Risk-Takers
Traditional carrots — pay hikes, bonuses, perks, and sticks — poor appraisal, denial of increment, lack of promotion, do work, but only to an extent in motivating employees. Real motivation comes from within and is best generated in an atmosphere of growth and creativity. It keeps employees energised and committed, especially the world-changers and the risk takers types, who thrive on disruption. The promise of innovation gives purpose and meaning to their work. Such people are an asset for companies that want to stay ahead of competition.
Energised Value-Creation
An organisation is all about its people. long-term innovation models require dedicated inputs, support, and engagement from the employees and all stakeholders involved. Progressive organisations are the ones having skills to manage complexities of human minds, as people working for the organisations are different in their requirements even when moving along the same trajectory. To be successful in today’s fast-changing business environments with collective and energised value-creation, companies need to adopt holistically innovative mindset.
Creativity and innovation at workplace progress with soul searching. If organisations are able to find out their raison d’être, capabilities grow like never before. On the other hand, if they only focus on revenue generation, there are chances of disenchantment of the employees. Inculcating a culture of innovation is imperative even for better human resource management, attracting inspired talent and managing brand reputation.
Challenge & Opportunity
Even a decade back, innovation was viewed as a primary challenge of building leadership capabilities. Today the lens of innovation has become the indispensable high-performance mantra for organisations which are ready to incubate experiment and come up with breakthroughs. Innovation is understandably becoming a part of boardroom agenda, managerial decision-making, and leadership processes. Innovative leaders are today agents of change and an asset for any organisation. They lead by example to generate new ideas and turn challenges into opportunities, to stay one step ahead of the curve every time. They are also bold thought influencers in general with open-minded outlook. Rarely would find an innovator who is stuck inside his cabin all day long, rather he is all eyes and ears to new ideas.
Here, it must also be pointed out that an organisation’s innovation need not always be in the domain of products or services. It can also be in strategising, channelising manpower, and so on. All of that ultimately adds to the value chain of building efficient workplaces. Here, it is important to underline that while innovative ideas can be arbitrary or unstructured, the roadmap for execution needs to be clear; it makes implementation easy and convenient.
The Way Forward
It is becoming increasingly clear that innovation backed by adequate in-house R&D is the way forward for organisations to succeed and for employees to excel. There are companies that have launched ‘internal start-up’ programmers, where teams work on entrepreneurial ideas, to stimulate creativity. Others have started competitions where employees pitch ideas to improve the business, and the best ones get funding and support. Employees know they can contribute ideas and that they will be rewarded for their contributions. That encourages them to think differently and come up with innovative ideas. When it comes to companies operating in the agrochemical space, embracing cutting-edge innovative technologies helps immensely in dealing with issues on-ground, and developing sustainable products for customised needs.
But it’s not as if innovation is new to Indian business. The rural community driven economy of our country has been turning to jugaad (which itself is ground-level innovation at its best) for as long as one can remember.
The digital age we live in allows a more open and collaborative environment where everyone works to brainstorm on ideas. The new environment allows for collaboration and ideas to come from any quarter, not hemmed in by hierarchies. Inculcating a culture of innovation is one of the most important things a leader can do to improve the performance of employees and the balance sheet of the company. But it is tough. Entrenched corporate cultures thwart innovation efforts. Business leaders need to reinvent their culture and deliver better innovation.
But going forward, only disruptive process-driven innovation will act as a critical differentiator in outperforming the existing standards of organisational excellence. When led by outstanding torchbearers or smart entrepreneurs, effective innovation management policies can energise teams to deliver their best. So instead of chasing profits for shareholders, we must focus on innovation which creates value for all stake holders and is therefore a loftier ideal for companies to follow.
(The writer is MD, Insecticides India ltd).