You’re on the innovation journey! The good news is there are many opportunities for improvement! Here are our top suggestions that typically help Aspiring Innovators advance their innovation capabilities.

Tip #1 - Raise executive level awareness

The speed of business change is exponential. To succeed, your organization must drive lasting change fast enough to keep pace with exponential technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, and 3D printing. Done correctly, innovation is both a top-down and bottom-up effort. The entire organization must be engaged, starting with your key stakeholders and executive team. Your leadership must understand that many emerging technologies, which seem more science fiction than science fact or far out into the future, are here now and potentially in use by your competitors. At Singularity University, our Custom Executive Learning Programs can help your leadership appreciate this new reality and see that the world around them is accelerating rapidly—both the technologies themselves and the impact they’ll have on your organization.

Tip #2 - Where the innovation capability lives in the organization matters

Where a company positions its innovation capability and focus is a key determinant of the support this function receives and therefore the quality of the outcomes it can generate. Placing the innovation group and its responsibilities directly in the future scenario planning or strategy team will help improve the alignment of your organization and lead to better results than giving the team limited resources or focus, or situating it in a less visible or less aligned department. Incorporating the innovation function into another department, such as Finance, can work in some cases, but doing so will likely hinder your innovation capability or make it more incremental in its focus, e.g., improving today’s core products and services. Rather, your future planning and scenario planning should predict what’s driving your business in the next 5, 10, or 15 years and receive the requisite staffing, operations focus, resources, and attention to drive exponential change for your organization. At Singularity University, we can help you develop this competency with our tailored Tech Scouting and Exponential Innovation Strategy Sprints.

At Singularity University, we help enterprise organizations (whether for-profit, nonprofit, or public sector entities) at every stage of the innovation journey to become exponential enterprises—organizations that can innovate at the pace of exponential technologies like AI, virtual reality, 3D printing, and others that are rapidly altering every competitive landscape and whose leaders have the right mindset and competencies to leap into the future right now. The infographic below shows our enterprise innovation model and product offerings that can help you advance your innovation capabilities from any starting point.