Executive Summary

The last few years have made us believe innovation cannot happen without technology. The majority of innovation we see these days is indeed enabled by technology. And “enabled” is the keyword here. Technology helps translate a great idea into a solution, that addresses a problem and changes the course of “how things are done” into reality.

It enables us to turn vision into reality. Cloud-based technologies provide us with three layers of capabilities: efficiency, transformation, and innovation. Efficiency pertains to a scenario where a process or existing capability has become more efficient by migrating to the cloud. Transformation is the scenario where the capability changes significantly from its current state. Innovation is the top layer that pertains to building capabilities that did not exist before, leveraging cloud-based services.

To truly innovate in a way that embeds innovation into how organizations operate, we need first to change how we think about innovation. Not understanding the core theme of innovation means we will fail in our quest to become innovative in the same way we failed to become “data-driven” organizations. We flooded our organizations with a portfolio of data and analytics tools. Yet, I can challenge that I can walk into any team other than your core data science and analytics team that your organization has, and prove that your teams are “tools-driven”, not “data-driven”.

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 level of the innovation. 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 before is a minuscule form of innovation. And unless we recognize and reward this aspect, we cannot build a genuinely innovation-driven organization.

Any form of transformation or innovation, from the perspective of operational innovation, stems from building a capability that erases a current state constraint. And with this perspective, you can develop a methodology, that can provide you a starting point for your cloud-based innovation journey. 

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