Sustainable Innovation in Times of Disruption: Choices for a Better Society

There are opportunities for progress all around us. The key is to innovate on these opportunities sustainably.

To help identify most effective path forward, you'll need to gain a global perspective to these challenges in an open discussion. How can Japan and the world take action to create a more sustainable, innovative world? Where do you fit in?

It's time to find out.

Strategy: Understanding the External Environment

To plan strategy on any level, you need to understand your company's external environment. In fact, your level of understanding can impact hiring, budgeting, marketing, or nearly any other part of the business world. Want to learn how to do all that? This course from GLOBIS Unlimited is the perfect first step!

For many people (and companies), “change” is a big, scary word. But you know what’s typically less scary and far more exciting? Innovation.

Funny thing is, change and innovation go hand in hand.

Managing change and innovation in a company can be a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, you want your team members to trust your vision for your products and services, not to mention your judgment that you know what’s best. But on the other hand, top management sometimes mistakes needless change for a type of innovation.

Sustainable Innovation in Times of Disruption: Choices for a Better Society

There are opportunities for progress all around us. The key is to innovate on these opportunities sustainably.

To help identify most effective path forward, you'll need to gain a global perspective to these challenges in an open discussion. How can Japan and the world take action to create a more sustainable, innovative world? Where do you fit in?

It's time to find out.

Even when it’s successful, innovation often isn’t recognized for what it is until after the fact.

Stefan Sacre, CEO of Carl Zeiss and a lecturer at GLOBIS University, reflects on how his career made him the bringer of change in his GLOBIS Unlimited course, Leading Organizational Change. Below is an excerpt, in which he shares the difference between innovation and change and how to recognize the right kind of catalyst for either.

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Is there a difference between innovation and change?

Stefan Sacre: So the topic of change is one of the most prominent topics that you see in discussion and literature. The question is, how does that come?

Actually, the word “change” alone is not always on the front page. It comes in different facets, as well. Sometimes, it’s hidden as kaizen or improvement, which usually happens only if there’s change or in terms of innovation.

There’s no doubt almost all companies are aiming for innovation. But innovation comes only with change.

Where does organizational innovation come from?

Sacre: When I think about where the idea of change comes from, I see several angles—internal and external.

Strategy: Understanding the External Environment

To plan strategy on any level, you need to understand your company's external environment. In fact, your level of understanding can impact hiring, budgeting, marketing, or nearly any other part of the business world. Want to learn how to do all that? This course from GLOBIS Unlimited is the perfect first step!

One of them is triggered from the outside world, just the environment. For companies, very often, the market is changing, and that forces a company to respond. But there are also very often internal reasons where a company wants to change, and that is sometimes more difficult to motivate because the people who are affected may not recognize the need for it.

These reasons could be that the president or manager decides on a new strategy because he has a vision of the future that may be different from the status quo. Or it could be also for not-so-honorable reasons—that the leader wants to put his stamp on the company’s policy by implementing change for the reason of change.

How do you lead product innovation as an outsider?

Sacre: When I think about my own experience, I think back to my very first leadership role. At that time, I had spent several years in Japan. That was at the end of the 1980s. I was in Japan during the boom. Microelectronics was the new kid on the block. And with this knowledge, I got hired in Germany into an auto-electronics company.

The CEO of that company had the worry and concern that his rather conventional company based on traditional technology was threatened by what was supposedly the new “danger” coming from Japan. I was the person who should challenge the existing R&D organization in that company by showing what was outside in the world.

This was my first job. As a newcomer to that company, I was supposed to challenge the status quo. That was my mission.

So starting from my own experience trying to lead the change, I recognized that there’s a strong difference between the question of the “what”—what is the change—and the “how,” which is usually linked to people.

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