DRINK: THE NEWSLETTER

Volume 1 / Issue 3

WHAT IS INNOVATION

My two words: Creating Opportunity.

McKinsey & Co. says: Innovation is the systematic practice of developing and marketing breakthrough products and services for adoption by customers. What is Innovation? August 2022.

ISO TC 279 standard ISO 56000:2020 defines innovation as “a new or changed entity realizing or redistributing value”. Others have different definitions; a common element in the definitions is a focus on newness, improvement, and spread of ideas or technologies.

WHAT IS STRATEGY

My two words: Creating Opportunity.

McKinsey & C0. Says: Making choices ahead of time in the face of uncertainty. Why bad strategy is a ‘social contagion’, November 2, 2022, Podcast.

WHAT DO THEY HAVE IN COMMON

My one word: Foresight.

Strategy with the foresight of a long view envisions a future beneficial to all involved and served. Likewise, foresight leading to innovation can be transforming, disruptive, accelerating; shortening time while increasing value. Together, they envision and create new opportunity. Unfortunately, many are at the wrong end of the horse problem-solving with little consequence. Get to the right end. Focus forward on creating opportunity.

“Don’t wait for the right opportunity: create it” —George Bernard Shaw.

Step Out of the Chaos

If you spend your day responding to unplanned requests, trying to overcome operational challenges, and trying to find solutions to problems that are ill-defined, you’re not being strategy-smart, and certainly not innovative. Empower YOU, embrace forward-thinking vision and start advancing yourself, others, and your business. Strategy and innovation are about creating opportunity. Step out of the chaos and start creating.

This monthly newsletter provides soundbites to help you advance professionally and personally. It spotlights individuals who have transformed and advanced themselves, organizations, and the lives of others.

Most important, we want to hear your thoughts on the topics we present. I welcome hearing from you at len@rethinkinc.com (use subject DRINK).

In the spotlight

Frank Kowalkowski, Founder and President

Knowledge Consultants, Inc.

Leveraging Analytics for Insight, Value and Knowledge

Where does Innovation fit in the strategic management picture?

Organization management tends to develop business methods in capsules that surround the method. Integrating methods is not easy and often the methods such as the 75+ business models do not fit together neatly. It is like comparing apples and oranges as the popular saying goes. However by abstracting up or driving down we can actually compare two different fruits. By abstracting up we get common attributes like shape, color, taste and other properties of fruits that we can compare. By driving down we can compare based on the components that make up the fruits such as, sugar, pulp, water vitamins, minerals and so on.

Integrating different perspectives of an organization regardless of type is subject to the same type of thinking, we can abstract up say to department names, geographic regions etc. that allow us a broad comparison of organizations or we can drive down and compare them by their types of structures for processes, data, location and so on.

This brings us to integrating the innovation perspective with the strategy perspective. This is done by linking the components of strategy with the components of innovation and applying analytics that work not just with both but can link the innovation with strategy and align it with the strategic direction all the way to the execution perspectives.

 Some points to remember for integrating methods:

• • • It is all about decision making, you integrate to achieve some result.
    • The analytics may be statistical, semantic, neural nets, and machine learning.
    • Analytics may also be a composite, a grouping of analytics into a workflow with decisions along the flow.
    • Model components should be driven to the same level.
    • Naming of components should be consistent between the methods, a process is a process, a location is a location with common definitions.
    • Workflows are for material gathering and organization or for analysis.
    • The core tool that provides these analytics is Wizsm™.