Excerpt from the upcoming Designed Analytics report “Innovating With Cloud”.

I am not a fan of terms like “data-driven”. The reason is that these terms, and any organization’s corresponding focus on achieving whatever capabilities these terms, in their perspective, mean, often leads to undesired results.

If I dislike the term data-driven, why would I propose another BS term, innovation-driven organization? This question may arise from the misconception that we touched upon in Chapter 1. In my mind, innovation is simply doing something that has not been done before and addressing a pressing issue, challenge, or problem. That is why innovation has multiple hierarchies. It is critical to understand this hierarchy in a way that helps to understand how we can actually benefit from the cloud.

Let us assume that you work for a pharma company. If you were asked to list one or two innovations that your organization has generated, your answer would probably be along the lines of new drugs or new compound discoveries. And they, indeed, are innovations. However, these innovations sit at the top of the innovation hierarchies.

Employees in your organization may be innovating every day. Someone tired of performing a repetitive task may have developed a way to perform it more efficiently. That is innovation, too. While the relation may not be clearly evident, these innovations eventually create the system that leads to broader, strategic-level innovation. The gist is that there is a hierarchy of innovation.

It is important to understand this hierarchy since this is what will help you also understand how to drive innovation with cloud. I can fill ten pages with definitions of cloud technologies but the fact is, everyone is already aware of those technologies. Chances are, they are already leveraging them. However, the key question is: Are they generating innovation by leveraging those technologies? 

Did you really innovate if you were leveraging automation or analytics solutions on-premise and then migrated to the cloud? The answer can be both yes or no. If this migration allowed you to build even one capability in-house that did not exist before, that migration indeed allowed you to innovate.

On the other hand, if the benefits were entirely related to cost reduction, efficiency, and productivity, then though you have achieved benefits, you have not generated innovation. The point to note here, though, is that these benefits generally lay the foundation for innovation. The gist of this example is that innovation should not be confused with other benefits of leveraging the cloud. In this report, we are focused on innovation.

An innovation-driven organization is one where innovation is generated across multiple layers. Note that these layers do not pertain to organizational hierarchy but are more attuned to the impact of the innovation. As mentioned previously, something as trivial as an individual employee finding a new way to perform a task in a way that did not exist in the organization is a minuscule form of innovation. And unless we recognize and reward this aspect, we cannot build a genuinely innovation-driven organization.

In Chapter 3, we will understand this innovation hierarchy in detail and will also explore why it is important to understand for innovating in the cloud.

Make sure you do not miss the Designed Analytics report “Innovating With Cloud”, publishing on 03/31/2024.