8 Ways Knowledge Base Management Enables Innovation

Rather than optimizing your existing operations, you can lead your team through game changing ingenuity and outstrip the competition.

Knowledge Base Management or Innovation Management?

While it can be a challenge for enterprise-level companies to become innovators, it is possible through superior knowledge base management and an understanding of the elements that comprise innovation. McKinsey addressed this issue with a multi-year study that included workshops, in-depth interviews and surveys of over 2,500 executives across more than 300 organizations. These organizations were both luminaries of innovation and stragglers struggling by. McKinsey found that eight primary elements must be present within a company to turn a company into a top performer in process, product, or business model.

The complex nature of innovation means that you must make this an organization-wide venture. You must set into place processes and practices to organize, structure and promote it. These eight essential elements comprise this type of system, and they are frequently iterative, non-sequential, and coinciding practices that buck methodical categorization. However, they fall roughly into two categories. The first four elements are seen as vital and visionary in nature, able to set the conditions through which innovation thrives. The second four elements contribute to the implementation of an environment meant to encourage innovation.

These are the eight elements identified by McKinsey and questions to ask yourself to test if your company fosters true innovation.

1. Aspire: Does your organization value innovation-led growth as a must in the global marketplace?

2. Choose: Do you invest in the right initiatives and back them with sufficient resources?

3. Discover: Does your organization foster differentiated insights that translate into successful proposals?

4. Evolve: Do you build business models to provide expanding profit sources?

5. Accelerate: Can your company launch innovations efficiently and quickly to beat the competition?

6. Scale: Are your innovation launches scaled appropriately to the marketplace and the size of your organization?

7. Extend: Do you create success through the optimization of external networks?

8. Mobilize: Is your team appropriately rewarded and recognized for innovation?

In general, each organization will have a unique mix of innovative elements to provide a winning foundation. Your knowledge base management becomes crucial to sharing the expanding organizational wisdom. You will find clear indicators of the causative relationship between successful utilization of that knowledge base management and the innovations your team produces. Indeed, the statistics that McKinsey reported show correlation. When you embrace these eight essential elements in a way that fits into your corporate culture, operations, capabilities and propensity for risk, you will increase the probability that your team will revive the gleam of innovation. The global marketplace now evolves at phenomenal speeds. To remain competitive, your organization must adopt a superior knowledge base management system and the elements of innovation.