Disruption and transformation: 5 faces of innovation

The first interpretation involved the world of marketing, engaged in the “pursuit” of consumers who had shifted from TV to the Internet. Digital marketing developed increasingly effective and precise solutions to reach customers online, track their choices, offer suggestions, and follow them with the goal of anticipating their needs with proposals and offers. However, in many cases, the new relationship with the customer carried over some traits from the old one — namely, making the customer feel like a “target” to be hit with repeated messages, not always desired or useful.

The second interpretation involved management. Inspired by what was happening on social networks, they followed the promise of accessing the collective intelligence already present within the company. They began to view the workforce as a series of internal communities and aimed to bring the social organization to life. The prevailing idea was to create internal communities where people would exchange knowledge, ideas, and opportunities without “friction.” However, this interpretation often failed to consider two things: the varying levels of employee engagement with yet another top-down corporate initiative, and the need to tie each community’s purpose to the real work of the people in order for the community to truly grow.

The third interpretation — still ongoing — concerns technology for business. Always, and now more than ever, the availability of new technologies has transformed how companies create value, whether they are product-based or service-based. Through technology, companies can gain efficiency and generate new solutions. Today, two technologies are receiving the most attention from Italian entrepreneurs: data utilization and Industry 4.0. These technologies have led to the automation of both intellectual work and factory work. However, the potential of these solutions has often been significantly reduced due to various reasons, including the need for rapid reskilling in fairly complex areas, and in some cases, the need to review protections, contracts, and labor costs.

The fourth interpretation concerned innovation processes. Enter Open Innovation, which leads companies to open up to the outside world in search of ideas, skills, and ready-to-use technologies to quickly develop new services or products — often based on digital technologies and capable of creating a new relationship with the customer. This approach has often led to pilot projects or product/service lines added to existing ones. However, two limitations have emerged. The first is that these projects often result in structures that are poorly integrated with the rest of the organization, which therefore does not see its overall innovation potential grow. The second is that companies don’t always consider the context they are opening up to. Choosing the right context is crucial for accessing high-quality ideas, solutions, and know-how. There is no real strategy for this, as it would require integrating innovation approaches with those typical of HR — and these are still two worlds that speak very different languages.

The fifth interpretation concerns ways of working aimed at improving performance, and it’s an approach that has been spreading in Italy since 2015. Companies have started to see new ways of working as a way to generate value with the same resources — and thus survive in today’s competitive arena. Speed of response, execution, and solving customer problems are essential levers to stay competitive and retain the customer base. To achieve this, organizations must abandon work models centered on functions and hierarchies, and instead create new models based on multidisciplinary teams that interact under new rules of the game. Hence the search for methodologies like Design Thinking, Agile, Prototyping, etc. Once again, their application typically starts within specific organizational structures — the first to be involved are usually the IT or R&D departments.

The promise of these new ways of working is to deliver what we have called dominant dynamics in organizational transformation.
These dynamics drive the evolution of organizations toward models centered on customer value.

These models are characterized by the ability to manage and solve any request or issue where it arises — without the need for authorization processes or hierarchical escalation.
They are models that strongly engage people because they allow them to reconnect their contributions to the value generated for the customer.
These organizational models and ways of working can significantly enhance innovation initiatives across the other four dimensions, because innovation always needs someone to act on it.