2019.10.30 / Open Lecture

"2019 Corporate Lecture": The Basic Practice of Leaders Driving Innovation

We are in an era where everything is new, fast, and change-oriented, and the word "innovation" has become a curse on corporate leaders; in order to pursue profits, in order to have a continuous competitive advantage, in order to successfully cross the discontinuity, in order for the business to survive, in order to achieve a good vision ... etc. We need creativity everywhere, we need new ideas, and we need to find practical innovations, specific directions and routes.

But in fact, many "managers" are not a qualified "leader" from the beginning. Managers oversees the operation while leaders have to be creative and innovative. Modern management is the product of the industrial revolution. In the traditional sense, management is about planning, organization, command, coordination and control, pursuing rational and objective facts, but the premise of innovation is to understand: "Unknown Is the norm! " .

The well-known consulting company McKinsey spent five years tracking and investigating the design behavior of 300 listed companies in different countries and different fields, collecting nearly 100,000 design initiatives and 2 million financial indicators in these companies over the past five years, and establishing a design database for benchmarking. According to the analysis, the global release of the McKinsey Design Index MDI quantifies the positive contribution of design to the growth of corporate revenue, market value, and total shareholder return. This report clearly reflects the business value of design-driven innovation.

The significance of design-driven innovation strategy is a blue ocean strategy from a commercial point of view, innovating product language and internal meaning from many homogeneous products, jumping out of the Red Sea to open up new markets and leading the trend. Such innovations can be subversive, create user needs, and give new meaning to products. They are not drawn by market demand and are not easily copied by competitors.

Contemporary leaders are full of anxiety about innovation. They don’t know how to do it. They don’t know what will happen. Because we are afraid of the unknown and failure, as a habit, we are always trying to find ways to know what is going to happen. Judgment, such a thinking mode will affect the efficiency and results of innovation in the business leadership. So today's managers must learn to innovate, just as they must learn to manage in the industrial age, learning the basic skills of "from management ability to innovation ability".

Without inspiring leaders, there is no successful innovative project. The ultimate failure of many companies can be attributed to the leaders' failure to recognize the changes in the new environment and make adjustments accordingly. The leadership that an organization needs is not limited to the present and short-term future, but a kind of innovative leadership with a broader and longer-term vision. Such leadership focuses not only on profits, markets and strategies, but also on business position in society.

In order to help the transformation and upgrading of businesses in Kunshan City, and promote the innovation and development of businesses, the Kunshan Municipal People's Government Taiwan Affairs Office specially organized a series of courses for the 2019 Business Lecture. In particular, Amber, the strategic director of Working images, was invited to Kunshan to share and communicate with business executives, discuss the three innovation models of technology, market and design-driven, put forward the necessary foundation for how executives promote innovation in the organization, and share and interact through cases so that the executives at the meeting can understand the true meaning of design-driven innovation from "doing".

Feedback from participants:

"It seems like a simple activity. After listening to the analysis of the teacher, I found out that it actually contains many principles. This lecture is very rewarding."

"I have a clearer understanding on innovation, and I find that I need to pay attention to whether I jump back to the inherent thinking at work."