InKM is helping companies sharpen their innovation capabilities with proven strategic approaches. To build advantage, organizations must do more than just change. They must transform.

We define a transformation as a profound change in a company’s strategy, business model, organization, culture, people, or processes.

InKM's consultants and industry experts focusing on innovation and product development continue to partner with leading companies to arrive at solutions in transformation & innovation strategy, R&D, and more.

We live in a world where knowledge-based work is expanding rapidly. So is the application of technology to almost every business process and job. But to date, high-end knowledge workers have largely remained free to use only the technology they personally find useful. It’s time to think about how to make them more productive by imposing a bit more structure. This combination of technology and structure, along with a bit of managerial discretion in applying them to knowledge work, may well produce a revolution in the jobs that cost and matter the most to contemporary organizations.

Challenges, Opportunities, and Solutions

While driving short-term and medium-term initiatives, companies benefit from stepping back and looking at their overall strategy and operating model.

A transformation is not an incremental change but a fundamental reboot that enables a business to achieve a sustainable, valuable improvement in performance, altering the trajectory of its future.

Because of the comprehensive nature of transformations and the need for companies to implement them quickly, transformations are complex endeavors, and the majority either fail to fully capture the potential value or exceed the time allotted to embed new behaviors and processes.

It’s time for companies to develop a strategy for knowledge work - one that not only provides a clearer view of the types of information that workers need to do their jobs but also recognizes that the application of technology across the organization must vary considerably, according to the tasks different knowledge workers perform.

The most common approach, giving knowledge workers free access to a wide variety of tools and information resources, presumes that these employees will determine their own work processes and needs. The other, the structured provision of information and knowledge, involves delivering them to employees within a well-defined context of tasks and deliverables. Leaders of knowledge workers should understand the key differences among them and tailor solutions to these peculiarities.

The greatest potential for productivity improvements involves bringing more structured knowledge to workplaces and processes where the free approach has dominated.

Transformation & Innovation

Innovation is challenging. Companies know that innovation is one of the keys to growth. In our view, innovation is a system: a mixture of insight and creativity, as well as a disciplined process that consistently promotes progress. This system has three major components: a strategy comprising choices on where and how to create growth and value through innovation; a supporting set of processes for research and product development; and an enabling set of systems, tools, and capabilities.

Innovation can mean many different things to different stakeholders. Organizations without a clear definition tend to dilute their focus and lack accountability for outcomes, hindering good results. By contrast, an unambiguous definition with a clearly articulated purpose helps create an innovation culture, organizational alignment, and ownership - becoming, in effect, a compass that ensures everyone is moving in the same direction.

They combine a sharp strategy for where and how to innovate with a fast, agile, and lean development process that efficiently transforms ideas into profitable growth.

We collaborate with clients to dig up valid data, rigorous analyses, external perspectives, root causes, and explicit logic. The goal is to uncover moments of insight - and to have the courage to embrace, and act on, the truths that surface