To properly manage and quickly scale innovations, organizations need to fully exploit the latest digital technologies. For example, data analytics and artificial intelligence could help to optimize the deployment and scaling of hydrogen fuel, energy from biomass, and carbon capture and storage.
As the pursuit of sustainable innovation will depend on creativity, resilience, and adaptability, changes to the operating model are also likely to be required.
As the pursuit of sustainable innovation will depend on creativity, resilience, and adaptability, changes to the operating model are also likely to be required. We recommend that organizations develop a center of excellence for innovation that decentralizes decision-making and empowers local teams to own initiatives focused on solving technical challenges that lead to breakthrough opportunities.
We also regard the following three “future-fit pillars” as vitally important:
- Enable and expand external innovation ecosystems that help build a community of practice for sustainability.
- Build a structured process that nurtures disruptive ideas from problem discovery to final realization.
- Tap into new technologies — especially those emerging from the Fourth Industrial Revolution — for strategic insights that guide game-changing innovation. Here, innovation management software offered by Planbox can help.
The ongoing shift to sustainability could see the most radical change to companies’ operations for several decades. With the Earth itself hanging in the balance, such radicalism is justified. The future must be sustainable, or there will be no future at all.
Ludwig Melik is Chief Executive Officer of Planbox, the cloud-based, AI-powered agile innovation management platform. (Featured image by Ratanjot Singh on Unsplash.)
