Innovation - a response to rising stakeholder expectations

The world is becoming a harder place to live in and is full of uncertainties. The energy crisis, population growth, depletion of natural resources, spread of deadly epidemics, global terrorism, natural disasters, food scarcity and environmental pollution are some areas the world is grappling with for sustainable resolution.

What role can business organisations play within their own limitations? Can innovation find solutions to these issues? In the past, organisations did innovate to survive - more recently innovation was used to differentiate thus maintaining their competitiveness in the market. The need of the hour is to innovate to sustain.

Balance

The triple bottom-line - profit-planet-people as a mere concept, façade or fashion is inadequate to sustain. The limiting factor is that there is no accepted norm, regulation or legislation on the right balance between the three elements.

The question is why should a business organisation invest on the planet and people and minimise competitiveness?

In the Sri Lankan business environment, the most common barrier to innovation in organisations are leaders who are not open to new ideas and unwilling to make the right investment to promote innovation. This negativity impacts the team by discouraging creative thoughts. Space for thinking, right tools, supportive systems and processes are ingredients to promote innovation.

We all know that we have a long way to go - don't we? There are a number of factors that prevent innovation from taking place.

Being able to recognise and work through these factors will help you to create an innovative culture in your organisation and help you to make your business successful. Innovation in response to rising consumer expectations has been the order of the day.

Customers are used to products that continually improve and make their life easier. But given the multiplying challenges for mankind as a whole, innovation should go beyond business objectives.

In a broader sense, innovation is important for the advancement of society around the world, in the backdrop of depleting resources to be shared by the increasing population. Breakthrough innovation can increase the standard of living and provide people with opportunities to improve their lives and prolong the life of natural resources for future generations.

How do we still create an environment that allows our people to have a decent quality of life and preserve the biologically diverse ecosystems to create a sustainable future for Sri Lankans?

Commercially viable

Practical perspective though is that innovators need to wear multiple hats - think commerce and economics to generate viable innovative options to overcome global challenges. Economic and market theory dictates that the innovation should have a commercial value to benefit humans.

This dilemma is a major hindrance to liberal innovation. So how do you motivate companies to promote innovation? Firstly, the inner social obligation for personal satisfaction, recognition for people and business and targeted incentives and the respect and admiration from the people would facilitate the right level of focus on innovation.

Business leaders today are challenged by the economic and market theory to reduce cost, improve efficiency, minimise consumption and move the world away from living off natural capital.

There is a clear economic danger ahead of us but carried with it is a great opportunity. I hope that our business leaders are up to the challenge to make the best use of the opportunity to invent, design or adapt and commercialise the innovation that will lead Sri Lanka to a sustainable future. We have seen a positive trend towards constant innovation mainly by the global giants. Innovation at country level has been rare but unique excellence has been observed. With greater awareness about the value of innovation the respect for such organisations will only increase.