Business Services Help Innovation
Are you fostering a culture of innovation?
Finance, HR, procurement and IT professionals play very specific roles in innovation and the support of their business' enterprise growth strategies. In addition to improving efficiency and reducing cost, there is a need now for business services functions to develop new competencies and reallocate resources to higher value-added activities.
A study by The Hackett Group entitled How Business Services Can Support Today's Innovation Agenda found that 98% of companies believe that innovation will become a more important competitive differentiator in their industry. For 62% of study participants, creating disruptive innovation is an important part of their business strategy. While high levels of disruptive innovation are to be expected in technology-centric industries, this finding now applies across all industries.
Adoption vs. effectiveness of innovation practices by functional area
Key takeaways from this report include:
- Failure to respond to changing demands from the business dictated by an innovation-based growth agenda is a sure recipe for business services to become irrelevant.
- Finance must improve its innovation-related decision support and financial modeling capability.
- HR must implement programs to foster an innovation-oriented business culture.
- Procurement must foster supplier-led innovation.
- IT must reallocate resources away from “run the business” and “improve the business” activities, focusing them instead on “innovate the business” activities.
By Erik Dorr and Sean Kracklauer of The Hackett Group
Published in Enterprise Strategy, Management Issue
Available for download with permission.