Innovation refers to the ability of businesses or entrepreneurs to preempt the market and foster and develop know-how and ideas to execute them timely through a profitable commercialization strategy. Innovation management now acts as the backbone of successful business administration in the corporate world, which has several proven strategies and practices.
Collaborative innovation is one among such unique proven strategies, which is capable of bridging the gaps between a flexible organizational structure. Collaborative innovation aims at a quality-driven workforce, which is involved in business idea generation with their imaginative capability freed and focused towards innovations. The goal of collaborative innovation is achieved through a top-down drive that encourages the participation of all members with ways to stimulate their creativity and bring out ideas, which can be nurtured and harvested.
Incorporating Collaborative Innovation
Any organization that wants to incorporate collaborative innovation effectively into their organizational practice needs to think of an organizational overhaul. This change needed to be embodied in the mission statement and to be buried to the management DNA. Continuous quality improvement through collaborative innovation is a focused action, for which the entire organization needs to be configured for quality.
While thinking of this quality-centric approach, many organizations already have an effective quality system in place as quality circles or quality accreditation. They take initiative to continuously improve the product quality, diversify design models, and keep on enhancing their products. But the decline starts when the market changes, what once had been successful become obsolete, customers switch with lack of innovation, and the profitability of the business declines. So, for many organizations, transforming back to life requires collaborative innovation, which can be incorporated with a profound culture change.
Conceptual Framework for Innovation
The conceptual framework of collaborative innovation is a model to help one understand the process, ways to implement it, fine tune it, and re-engineer when change becomes necessary. In many organizations, a successful model combines the social systems (policies / people / structure / procedures) and technical systems (technology used) effectively
Majority of successful organizations adopt to technological changes competently, and make the social systems mature and comprehensive to deal with it. Collaborative innovation successful incorporates the social systems to be a part of this innovation movement, which gives the people also a feel that they are vital in the entire system. On initiating such a collaborative innovation model, even if 90% of the ideas generated go in vein, the rest can be really worth it. Transformation of the culture this way can ensure optimal performance and output, which becomes a byproduct of collaborative innovation transformation.
Integrated Approach
The integrated approach to innovation identifies an organization as an organism, which has its components as people, culture, and technology. Each of stands interdependent and cannot be separated. These carefully woven structures enable and promote innovation naturally. To bring in a sustainable long-term change in an organization, an integrated approach to collaborative innovation seems to be crucial.
We can see that in both the approaches, culture of the organization is a key factor. This is why many of the leading organizations formally think of analyzing their culture and re-engineer it to practice collaborative innovation for growth.
