Trees don’t grow to the sky forever. Even though an organization’s core business may be healthy today, this does not mean doing more of the same will lead to long-term sustainable growth. Globalization, intense competition and accelerated product development cycles have made innovation to be an indispensable element of organizational success. For organizations and nations alike, innovation should be harnessed as a multiplier to growth.
In the inaugural issue of the Insights Series – Volume 1 in 2010, we focused on “Demystifying Innovation”. As the world was beginning to emerge from the global financial crisis, and Bangladesh was getting reacquainted with a new political leadership, we recognized that a systemic redesign was taking shape both globally and at home. In that publication we drew attention to links between innovation and economic development and discussed the rationale behind leveraging innovation as a way of informing the systemic redesign. We explored the why.
In this current issue of the Insights Series – Volume 2, we explore the how. Our theme this year is “Applied Innovation”.
In this issue, we cover both a broad-based approach to strengthening the business case for innovation and highlight noteworthy illustrations of how innovation can be harnessed effectively. We look at 13 different innovation strategies an organization can adopt depending on which market stage the organization is in. We see how innovative partnerships are taking shape in the global healthcare space to fight diseases in developing nations. We study how innovation and knowledge management go hand in hand to enhance organizational efficiency. We analyze the findings from a survey that underscores the entrepreneurial spirit of our youth and missing building blocks in our education system that inhibit innovation. We delve deep into five innovative strategies that organizations can use to engage more equitably with BOP market segments. We look at the role of social networking, Facebook in particular, in political movements and individual empowerment. Collectively, the articles cover incremental innovations (knowledge management, healthcare partnerships) and disruptive innovations (serving the poor profitably, social networking).
The articles presented in the Insights Series are written by pi STRATEGY staff, fellows and advisors. These thought leadership articles leverage our expertise and insights gathered from strategy and innovation initiatives around the world for several decades. We hope that the ideas presented here can inspire innovative solutions to some of the pressing challenges you and your organizations face today.
This article was written in 2011.
pi STRATEGY