Just Keep Innovating is a Bad Advice

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A Reflection of My Wharton Class for the Week

I often hear the mantra "let’s keep innovating" in corporate circles. After reflecting on my recent sessions at Wharton, I’ve realized that while the sentiment is noble, the execution is often lacking strategy.

Innovation is not a "one-size-fits-all" activity. It must be anchored in the enterprise's corporate strategy, specifically balance between Exploitation and Exploration.

• Exploitation is about margins, efficiency, and profit.

• Exploration is about growth, discovery, and the future.

If you don't know which one you are doing, your innovation initiatives will likely fail.

The ROI in an Exploitation strategy vs Return on Investment. In an Exploration strategy, I like the joke that ROI sometimes feels like "Repression of Investment"—because the returns aren't immediate, and the risk is higher.

To create initiatives that actually matter, technology teams must matrix the corporate strategy against the three innovation strategic horizontals:

1. Product Innovation

2. Process Innovation

3. New Market Innovation

The Ambidextrous Enterprise True organizational success requires an ambidextrous approach. This isn't about chaos or confusion; it's about the disciplined execution of bi-directional micro-initiatives. A balanceof the two. Core business someday becomes obsolete(exploitation) while new market becomes the core(exploration). Thus single strategy fails.

For example: anchoring a micro-initiative in process innovation specifically serve an exploitation goal (driving down costs).

This leads me to the DevSecOps strategy we build for an airline company 2 years ago as a perfect example. We need to cut cost due to COVID thus we did process improvement. Through DevSecOps we reduced release to production from 5 days to 15 minutes through process innovation and gearing towards opensource technology.

The result; it won 2nd place out of 90 initiatives at corporate level. It second against new market initiative which is right given growth will always takes higher precedence over efficiency with diminishing return.

Innovation doesn't have to be "expensive" or "wasteful." With a proper strategic framework, you ensure that every tech initiative—whether exploring new frontiers or exploiting current strengths—delivers a return that aligns with the firm’s ultimate intent.

THUS ambidextrous strategy is needed. One for exploitation(core business) and one for exploration(innovation-growth) should be balanced.

Reference: Wharton CTO Program - CTO Strategic Mindset