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Redefining Innovation in the face of radical market drifts enables organizations to produce enterprise growth, evolution, and increases shareholder value.

Drifts caused by economic, technological, demographic, and political change create new sets of threats, obligations, and opportunities. Reconfigured human and business concerns compel senior innovation leaders to assess and if necessary, define and redefine what innovation is and isn't within their organization. Corporate innovation teams are well positioned to lead their organizations through these changes.

There are several domains that innovation leaders can use to refurbish their definition of innovation including growth, transformation, resilience, and adaptability.

Adaptability As An Innovation Tactic

Expanding on the definition of innovation - what it is and isn't within your organization, will allow for a more complete and robust platform to advance the corporate strategy and growth agenda.

Innovation is ambiguous and can be bent and shaped to include almost any pet project an executive needs. But, this is a dangerous strategy when shareholder value, hundreds of thousands of jobs, and the future of your organization is concerned. Attaching specific definitions to the innovation agenda is essential for repeat innovators to accomplish.

Adding 'adaptability' to the innovation portfolio creates a more robust and complete definition allowing metrics, teams, and capital to form around this strategy.

Defining An Adaptability Strategy

What exactly is an adaptability strategy?

It's not common for most organizations to employ an explicit adaptability strategy - in fact, it's quite uncommon. It's important to first understand the concept of adaptability and how it shows up in the philosophies, values, and practices teams and leadership.

We propose an augmented approach that embeds adaptability into the practices of the organization. Sufficient guidance is provided to leadership, executives, and managers to utilize a framework of practices which allows the individuals and teams to adjust their approach to marketplace drifts and shifts in customer preferences. Organizations that use this type of an adaptability approach are proved to be more agile, responsive, and growth more rapidly than those that don't. If the US armed forces are able to institute an adaptability approach, in one of the most rigorous, structured environments on earth, then your organization can surely do the same.

An adaptability strategy allows an organization to pivot and adjust to rapidly changing circumstances through a framework that allows for adaptation and adjustment yet it's up to each leadership team to decide how best to utilize this approach. We'll continue to outline the fundamentals of an adaptability strategy below.

Marketplace drifts compel senior executives to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances or face certain decline.

Adaptability Strategy Through Leadership

There are four key domains for implementing an adaptability strategy: Leadership, Training and Education, Operations, and Culture.

What does it look like for a senior executive in a leadership position to implement an adaptability strategy? There's a fine line between empowering your organization to do what's necessary to compete and letting your teams assume too much independence therefore threatening the overall mission. It's imperative for senior leaders to establish these boundaries through consistent, clear communication, strong leadership, and empowerment.

Setting the parameters to empower teams within a set of boundaries is a tightrope to walk - for sure; yet - the most effective leaders figure out the most appropriate method for doing so and executing.

Adaptability Strategy Through Training and Education

Organizations have created scores of approaches to educating current and new employees on policies, procedures, processes, and philosophies.

Embedding an adaptability strategy into the operations and culture of the organization is a practice that can begin before the employee is hired all the way through to when they hold senior leadership positions. Selecting appropriate training and exercises to teach adaptability will embed this philosophy into the daily operations and culture. Intentionally embedding adaptability can be accomplished through off-site trainings with professionals, in real time through interactions with the market and customers, and through hiring practices that place a high value on this trait.

Picking an appropriate training and education program to teach the skill of adaptability is one of the fundamental approaches to ensure any organization is able to adjust to rapidly changing marketplace drift.

Adaptability Strategy Through Operations

An adaptability strategy's nexus point is through the operationalization of 'plans of actions'.

Adopting an adaptability strategy can reveal itself in as simple an action as choosing to sell or not to sell to a certain customer. Larger, more impactful decisions might include whether to enter a new market, introduce a new product line, hire a key leader, or to raise additional capital. These individual actions require context to be understood more deeply as it relates to adaptability. For instance, choosing not to enter into a new and opportunistic market might reduce risk that has been taken on during previous expansions. Once again, context - which is set by the leaders - is required to understand how these actions relate to and allow for adaptability.

Adaptability Strategy Through Culture

Culture can be an incredibly useful space of possibilities to install values, including those associated with adaptability.

Prior to delving into culture as a strategic tool, it's important to understand what culture is and how it's produced. There are several schools of thought regarding culture - one perspective is that culture is a derivative of processes, practices, and belief systems. Another perspective is that culture is intentionally creates through direct action. Regardless of the approach, and however culture is produced, it can be an effective way to increase and sustain adaptability.

Adaptability culture can be created intentionally or indirectly through strong leadership, precise operations, and processes and practices that reflect its importance.

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