Approaching Innovation and Digital Strategies

Fig. 11. Success factors for innovation (DEN Academy Leadership Program, 2021).

The innovation strategy described above can be achieved and benchmarked following four success factors for innovation (Figure 11):

• Learning organisation. Being a learning organisation means creating a context where the staff can develop the necessary innovative skills. This is made possible by implementing a participatory environment where knowledge sharing is fostered and by allocating a budget for training.
• Innovation culture. Having a culture of innovation means being ready, as an organisation, to plan ahead and, at the same time, have the agility to implement innovative changes. This means that the organisation allocates a budget for innovative projects, it can take risks and it is responsive to the external environment. 
• Innovation comes from outside. An organisation needs to conduct a structural and systematic futuring and trendwatching of the outside world in order to get new perspectives on chances and opportunities for digital innovation. For example, this means to be updated on policy trends at the EU level, and to work with trend radar as an instrument to effectively relate the organisation to future perspectives and trends. A methodical trendwatching enhances to spot developments that have the potential to be game changers on time; to grow the capability to see patterns in the adoption of technologies; to inspire new strategies and directions for the organisation; and to have a constructive conversation on the future of the organisation. 
• “Futuring”: generating insights about the future in a methodical way to enhance present-day choices. The trends that are reasoned into images of futures can be divided into four categories: possible (might happen), plausible (could happen), probable (likely to happen), and preferred (want to happen).
• “Trend watching”: generating continuous, methodical insights into deviations from “the normal”. These deviations can be emerging or disappearing and can be classified as: DESTEP (Demographic, Economic, Cultural, Technological, Ecological and Political/Legal), VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambigu), or Technology specific (social, movile, analytics, cloud).
• Network society. Organisational networks are relatively stable cooperative relationships between organisations based on horizontal rather than hierarchical coordination, recognizing one or more network or collective goals. Networks, in order to be so, need six elements: actors, connections, knowledge, informal network, differentiation (very different organisations) and integration (cohesion in the network). Networks enable organisations to share and develop specific knowledge and skills, to have access to capital and other resources, and to face complex challenges, realizing outcomes which none of them can realise on their own.

References

• Fagerberg, J. (2004). Innovation: A Guide to the Literature. In J. Fagerberg, D. Mowery, and R. Nelson (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Innovation (pp. 1-26). http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199286805.003.0001. 
•  Cohen, W. M., & Levinthal, D.A. (1990). Absorptive Capacity: A New Perspective on Learning and Innovation.
• Administrative Science Quarterly, 35, 128-152. https://doi.org/10.2307/2393553.
• DEN Academy Leadership Program. (2021). Digital Strategy and Innovation. Visual Report Module 1-2. Making the most of the (digitally) networked society [PowerPoint slides].