Business innovation and emerging trends

Wanted to start this part of the blog by showing this beautiful description of the various trends that flow into waves and at the end help in forming what is called business innovation.

As you can see it takes a lot of elements to form the end product of business innovation. Technology trends, experiences from the past projects, business models that were the final product of endless Enterprise Architectural analysis session, society playing one of the major roles, and an endless list of innovation management elements that in turn create a package known as business innovation. This is an essence of innovation programs, and innovation activities, its best practices.  The target leaders for such type of models are CXOs, Business and Unit leads, Strategic advisors, essentially everyone who is looking to innovate and create something new for their organization.

Another great example or reference in the Gartner article by which business is innovated is what is known as a STREET model. It is comprised of Scope, Track, Rank, Evangelize, Evaluate, and Transfer.

Looking at the societal trends, it is also very important to utilize the methodologies above to get an edge over the competition. To gain a competitive advantage, it is very essential to spend time on all the elements (technology trends, societal impacts, etc). This will not only help with designing a strategy and a trend, but also a path towards a common goal of innovation.

Reference: https://www.gartner.com/doc/1938314/agenda-business-innovation-emerging-trends

Innovation, maturity model, and Enterprise Architecture

According to Gartner, the innovation maturity model is structured into five maturity levels:

• Reactive
• Active
• Defined
• Performing
• Persuasive

For the organizations to progress, Gartner further breaks down the levels of innovation into further 6 categories:

• Strategy and Intent : Enterprises show their intent by having their leaders come up with various strategic plans that focus towards innovation.
• Processes and Practices : having a formal set of process enables the leaders of the organization to facilitate innovative ideas, in other ways, having a more organized, quantitative way of creating scenarios for innovation.
• Culture and People : Understanding the social behavior is very important, especially during innovation, and when the organization diverse culture is an influential factor.
• Organization and Infrastructure : Important to support and help facilitate the innovators within the organization.
• Partnerships : Having partnerships with the outside organizations that promote the idea of innovation is very critical for the success of the organization.
• Open Innovation : 

I agree with the Gartner article, that while applying these maturity models, enterprise architects should keep in mind the following;

- mature management should constantly work on improving there processes to come up with innovation all the time

- Enterprises and their parent companies should make every effort to determine if innovation is is managed locally versus centrally.

Refernce: https://www.gartner.com/doc/1621015/maturity-model-innovation-management

Enterprise Architecture and Innovation

This blog is all about how Enterprise Architecture processes, if introduced within the organization can help in driving innovation. Emergence of new technologies and more efficient processes will in turn increase the productivity of the company as a whole.

By following various steps as introduced by Enterprise Architecture, such as new concepts, creating proof of concepts that will lead to prototype building, and at the end piloting / rolling out beta product to a controlled group will help lead innovation within the organizations. This shows that EA (Enterprise Architecture) not only facilitates the organization in finding gaps, maturity level, but also can help drive innovation. Below picture explains visually the flow of innovation within the organization utilizing enterprise architecture as its major facilitator.

Furthermore, Enterprise Architecture equips leaders to build individual teams/ focus groups where their full time job is to utilize the findings from Enterprise Architecture studies, and create solutioning around it in order to introduce innovation, and develop creative products.