Innovation: It’s Not Art; It’s a Capability

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the May-June 2015 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

May-June 2015

As supply chain managers we are challenged year in and year out to figure out new, innovative ways to improve our operations. We have to translate educated guesses about what’s next into new investments in our processes. Such may be the case with robotics, 3D printing and additive manufacturing, and investments in new mobile technologies. However, successful planning, including planning for risk, resiliency, and flexibility, can help prepare you for whatever is next.

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Editor’s note: The A.T. Kearney Best Innovator competition began in Germany in 2003, partly in response to rising concern among Western European companies that more sophisticated—and lower-cost competitors—from emerging nations were threatening their long-term profitability and perhaps their survival. Contest organizers wanted to spotlight great innovators to show how innovation is done.

Now held in 20 countries around the globe, the competition has yielded a wealth of insights into how companies can excel in innovation management. This annual benchmarking against the best innovators focuses on the how-to of innovation and takes a deep look at what leading companies are doing to achieve better yield with their innovation strategies.

In Masters of Innovation: Building the Perpetually Innovative Company, a new book from A.T. Kearney, the authors highlight real experiences of the world’s Best Innovators from 10 years of results from the Best Innovator competition. Masters of Innovation is a manual for creating a permanently innovative organization, deriving lessons for best practices from the experiences of the Best Innovators—members of a select team of companies that come in all sizes and from all industries around the world. The excerpt below shows that being innovative is a repeatable process that can be studied, learned, and practiced—one that will sustain a company’s profitable growth for decades.

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