Its easy to give birth but to make it grow into a complete institution is a whole different journey!

Innovation is a Necessity for Survival

Innovation is defined as an idea, method, process, product, or practical solution to meet a need. It implies research, analysis, creativity, learning, and continuous improvement.  In the modern era, innovation is associated with computers, digital tools, automation, and technology, but it doesn’t always have to involve any of these things. Innovation could simply be a new solution or approach to a problem that a business association or chambers have not utilized before. It could be a new perspective on how to look at a problem.

Some sectors, particularly related to healthcare, personal care and hygiene, certain food industry segments, cleaning supplies, information and communications technology, big data analytics, drones, health technology, education technology, e-commerce, delivery services, artificial intelligence, and financial technology are thriving during this pandemic crisis’ economy. Others are questioning their business models and value proposition to innovate, adapt, and survive. Informal sectors in many emerging markets are incentivized with amnesty programs to move to the legally registered and tax-paying formal sector to be able to take advantage of government economic protection measures.

Inclusive Private Sector Engagement is a Must and Part of Good Governance :

As governments manage the crisis, each in their own manner, they struggle to balance the preservation of life and integrity of their health systems with economic activity and productivity. Many countries are operating under a state of emergency, granting them unprecedented powers. Some are placing an emphasis on transparency, accountability, and collaboration. Others are seizing the opportunity to create state-run monopolies and/or curtail rights and freedoms.

Some countries are bullying the private sector, blackmailing them to contribute to national economic relief funds, threatening them covertly with nationalization, or, imposing tough measures to safeguard employees at businesses’ expense. Other countries are only protecting select sectors or large enterprises, forgetting that small and medium enterprises are the engines of most economic activity. Others are using quasi-government business institutions to rubber-stamp government decisions, allowing them to claim private sector engagement as they roll out economic relief and recovery efforts.

Inclusive and diverse private sector engagement in formulating economic relief and recovery plans is a key strategy in managing the crisis successfully by any government. Business associations and chambers have a responsibility towards their members and sectors to ensure this level of engagement.  They also have the responsibility to provide practical solutions, raise awareness, garner support, effectively advocate, in addition to raising red flags pointing out problems.

some essentials of innovation :

Discover :

Innovation also requires actionable and differentiated insights—the kind that excite customers and bring new categories and markets into being. How do companies develop them? Genius is always an appealing approach, if you have or can get it. Fortunately, innovation yields to other approaches besides exceptional creativity.

The rest of us can look for insights by methodically and systematically scrutinizing three areas: a valuable problem to solve, a technology that enables a solution, and a business model that generates money from it. You could argue that nearly every successful innovation occurs at the intersection of these three elements. Companies that effectively collect, synthesize, and “collide” them stand the highest probability of success. “If you get the sweet spot of what the customer is struggling with, and at the same time get a deeper knowledge of the new technologies coming along and find a mechanism for how these two things can come together, then you are going to get good returns,” says Alcoa chairman and chief executive Klaus Kleinfeld.

The insight-discovery process, which extends beyond a company’s boundaries to include insight-generating partnerships, is the lifeblood of innovation. We won’t belabor the matter here, though, because it’s already the subject of countless articles and books.² One thing we can add is that discovery is iterative, and the active use of prototypes can help companies continue to learn as they develop, test, validate, and refine their innovations. Moreover, we firmly believe that without a fully developed innovation system encompassing the other elements described in this article, large organizations probably won’t innovate successfully, no matter how effective their insight-generation process is. 

Evolve :

Business-model innovations—which change the economics of the value chain, diversify profit streams, and/or modify delivery models—have always been a vital part of a strong innovation portfolio. As smartphones and mobile apps threaten to upend oldline industries, business-model innovation has become all the more urgent: established companies must reinvent their businesses before technology-driven upstarts do. Why, then, do most innovation systems so squarely emphasize new products? The reason, of course, is that most big companies are reluctant to risk tampering with their core business model until it’s visibly under threat. At that point, they can only hope it’s not too late.

Leading companies combat this troubling tendency in a number of ways. They up their game in market intelligence, the better to separate signal from noise. They establish funding vehicles for new businesses that don’t fit into the current structure. They constantly reevaluate their position in the value chain, carefully considering business models that might deliver value to priority groups of new customers. They sponsor pilot projects and experiments away from the core business to help combat narrow conceptions of what they are and do. And they stress-test newly emerging value propositions and operating models against countermoves by competitors.

Amazon does a particularly strong job extending itself into new business models by addressing the emerging needs of its customers and suppliers. In fact, it has included many of its suppliers in its customer base by offering them an increasingly wide range of services, from hosted computing to warehouse management. Another strong performer, the Financial Times, was already experimenting with its business model in response to the increasing digitalization of media when, in 2007, it launched an innovative subscription model, upending its relationship with advertisers and readers. “We went against the received wisdom of popular strategies at the time,” says Caspar de Bono, FT board member and managing director of B2B. “We were very deliberate in getting ahead of the emerging structural change, and the decisions turned out to be very successful.” In print’s heyday, 80 percent of the FT’s revenue came from print advertising. Now, more than half of it comes from content, and two-thirds of circulation comes from digital subscriptions.

Scale :

Some ideas, such as luxury goods and many smartphone apps, are destined for niche markets. Others, like social networks, work at global scale. Explicitly considering the appropriate magnitude and reach of a given idea is important to ensuring that the right resources and risks are involved in pursuing it. The seemingly safer option of scaling up over time can be a death sentence. Resources and capabilities must be marshaled to make sure a new product or service can be delivered quickly at the desired volume and quality. Manufacturing facilities, suppliers, distributors, and others must be prepared to execute a rapid and full rollout.

For example, when TomTom launched its first touch-screen navigational device, in 2004, the product flew off the shelves. By 2006, TomTom’s line of portable navigation devices reached sales of about 5 million units a year, and by 2008, yearly volume had jumped to more than 12 million. “That’s faster market penetration than mobile phones” had, says Harold Goddijn, TomTom’s CEO and cofounder. While TomTom’s initial accomplishment lay in combining a well-defined consumer problem with widely available technology components, rapid scaling was vital to the product’s continuing success. “We doubled down on managing our cash, our operations, maintaining quality, all the parts of the iceberg no one sees,” Goddijn adds. “We were hugely well organized.”

Mobilize :

How do leading companies stimulate, encourage, support, and reward innovative behavior and thinking among the right groups of people? The best companies find ways to embed innovation into the fibers of their culture, from the core to the periphery.

They start back where we began: with aspirations that forge tight connections among innovation, strategy, and performance. When a company sets financial targets for innovation and defines market spaces, minds become far more focused. As those aspirations come to life through individual projects across the company, innovation leaders clarify responsibilities using the appropriate incentives and rewards.

The Discovery Group, for example, is upending the medical and life-insurance industries in its native South Africa and also has operations in the United Kingdom, the United States, and China, among other locations. Innovation is a standard measure in the company’s semiannual divisional scorecards—a process that helps mobilize the organization and affects roughly 1,000 of the company’s business leaders. “They are all required to innovate every year,” Discovery founder and CEO Adrian Gore says of the company’s business leaders. “They have no choice.”

Organizational changes may be necessary, not because structural silver bullets exist—we’ve looked hard for them and don’t think they do—but rather to promote collaboration, learning, and experimentation. Companies must help people to share ideas and knowledge freely, perhaps by locating teams working on different types of innovation in the same place, reviewing the structure of project teams to make sure they always have new blood, ensuring that lessons learned from success and failure are captured and assimilated, and recognizing innovation efforts even when they fall short of success.

Internal collaboration and experimentation can take years to establish, particularly in large, mature companies with strong cultures and ways of working that, in other respects, may have served them well. Some companies set up “innovation garages” where small groups can work on important projects unconstrained by the normal working environment while building new ways of working that can be scaled up and absorbed into the larger organization. NASA, for example, has ten field centers. But the space agency relies on the Ames Research Center, in Silicon Valley, to maintain what its former director, Dr. Pete Worden, calls “the character of rebels” to function as “a laboratory that’s part of a much larger organization.”