Standing on the shoulder of the Giant for Innovation

Allan Cheng
6 min readJan 23, 2020

While threading along the VUCA terrain, many companies faced a shorten Sigmoid curve, famously known as the “S” curve, which forced many traditional companies went out of business. Entering into Industry 4.0 today, where businesses are disrupted by technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, robotics, autonomous tech, 3D printing, etc., the “S” curve is expeditiously shorten. Hence, what can companies do? To jump the curve, they must have an effective framework to help them innovate radically.

This article is about managing innovation, and not innovation itself. The research and study of “how great companies manage innovation” that I have recently undertaken, commendably triggered a paradigm shift in how innovation can be better managed. From the learning of the giant, I’ve further designed a tailored innovation management framework (a.k.a. The Innovation Funnel), which is illustrated in the below diagram aims to aid companies in radical innovation, possibly navigating smoothly along the treacherous route of VUCA.

STEP 1: Ambidextrous Leadership

It is critical that ambidextrous leadership is demonstrated across the organization as a culture as opposed to applying only to CEO. Nevertheless, the CEO should be the alpha in the leaders’ pack to ‘walk-the-talk’ and exemplifies the required behaviors and creates the atmosphere of being ambidextrous to the leaders in the organization; subsequently, the leaders learn by doing. In the Innovation funnel, ambidextrous leadership sets the culture, where it is the beginning of the innovation management process. Leaders will be expected to display agility in exploring new frontiers as well as exploiting existing business. A typical example of such behaviors will be the eagerness to take risks on new endeavors deriving business value, at the same time, transforming current business processes to be more efficient and evolutionary.

Companies may refer to appendix A for a set of questionnaire to test their ambidextrous leadership culture, put together by Deloitte Insights. Henceforth, ambidextrous leadership…

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