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Companies equate digitization to innovation, maybe because it is the present buzzword that sells. Maybe because there is extra capacity of the designers and developers they hired to develop apps and it costs too much to reskill the talent pool to do something else. So instead of pushing a portfolio of apps, innovation labs now push “consultants” to help innovate on your companies behalf by building bespoke apps that are difficult to integrate with and tend to sit outside anything remotely useful in your current technology landscape. Innovation teams blame legacy (IT and processes) for holding them back. IT and business blame the innovation lab for being unrealistic and not caring about existing revenue streams that help to pay their salaries. No one is happy and everyone just assumes the other camp is full of idiots.
So where did it all go wrong?
For starters, innovation is a philosophy. It is multidisciplinary, drawing inspiration from different disciplines to create something new and better. It is a way of living and believing that life can be better. And yes it should be fuzzy. If it is well defined, that would just be yet another project, which is what innovation has been bastardized to become by many corporates like the concept of Kaizen before that.
Corporations have created processes for innovation like design thinking, lean startup methodology etc. that guarantee results. But when the goal posts are determined by the same people that kick the balls, there might as well not be a goal post. The whole…
