Approaching Innovation and Digital Strategies

Strategy is a red-line to follow along with all big or everyday decisions. It is a clear vision, maybe even a dream, of where to go, helping to prioritise staff efforts and budgets. A strategy is a commitment to a set of policies and lines of action aimed at achieving a specific objective. Good strategies clarify objectives and priorities and help focus efforts around them. If the CHI has an existing global strategy, it must be either considered as the framework within which to operate or be questioned, so that consistency with the innovation strategy is ensured.

A good basis of a digitisation project:

As much as possible, we recommend that the innovation strategy is built as an open process, involving the team and board members, - and ideally the target communities - to obtain the necessary creativity, support and effectiveness.

Here is a list of questions to guide your team toward a tailored strategy :

• Why do we need/ want to go online?
• What are our specificities?
• What do our usual audience and partners like and don’t like about us?
• Who are our visitors? Who is not coming?
• Who are our team members? What skills and passions do they have?
• Where is our CHI: neighbours, society/ town/ community-specific stakes and appeals?
• What projects inspire us?
• What impact do we want to create and for whom?

When turning the first ideas into projects, we recommend to focus on SMART objectives (Specific, Measurable, Accessible, Realistic, Timed) and to think right away about the indicators that may help follow the success or not of each project: numbers of followers on social media channels? Evolution of the visitors: number, profiles? Number of articles / communication about the CHIs, but also satisfaction of the visitors, quality of the interactions during specific events, and so on.

To finish, innovation is iterative: it is a never ending process of curiosity, experimentation, evaluation and renewal (Figure 9). Enjoy!

Fig. 9. Iterative process of innovation.

Innovation is described as an open and iterative process also by Fagerberg, who has built a model (Figure 10) in which the dynamics, the processes and policy that shape the innovation system are described. In the model, the output of the innovation system is defined as “technological dynamics” and five influencing external processes are identified: knowledge, skills, demand, finance, and institutions. In Figure 10, solid arrows indicate the influences of the five processes on the technological dynamics, while dotted arrows show the potential feedback that can arise. For example, negative or positive feedback could decrease or increase the demand for certain types of skills. Also Kline and Rosenberg describe innovation not as a linear model, but as a process characterized by many feedbacks and loops that can lead to a re-evaluation of earlier steps. The five processes are also influenced by other elements, indicated in Figure 10, by the policy component. In this respect, openness to new concepts and solutions is crucial for innovative projects: organisations that are open to the feedback given by the external environments do not fall in the trap of being “locked out” from potential promising and successful ideas. In fact, organisations cannot be innovative if isolated, they need to largely interact with the environment in which they operate. Also Cohen and Levinthal underline these concepts, defining “absorptive capacity” as the ability of an innovative organisation to absorb outside knowledge and ideas.

Fig.10. The National Innovation System: Dynamics, processes and policy (Fagerberg, 2018).