Take a leaf out of Library Board's book

ACCORDING to management textbooks, strategy matters because it helps organisations to be different. While many firms succeed in asking the right questions as part of their strategic management process such as 'do we aspire to play to win?', others fail to align value propositions and internal capabilities with new megatrends, future-ready scenarios and the right strategic choices as evidenced by innovation flops such as Apple's Lisa Computer (Lisa was one of the first computers with a graphical user interface but it turned out to be too costly).

Visionary organisations often lack the internal capabilities to support their strategy. Strategy implementation and execution will not succeed if leaders do not speak with one voice about the vision thing; if goal-oriented programme objectives are detached from leadership accountabilities and future-oriented metrics; if early warnings such as an idea-unfriendly culture or the denials of major quality problems are not escalated to the top; or when team-related, intra-organisational interdependencies are poorly managed.

Corporate leaders who want to make innovation work need a winning innovation strategy. Innovation strategy is about the big decisions surrounding innovations, for example, whether, where and when to innovate and enter a new market. The failure of Borders and the success of Amazon underline the importance of strategic innovation aligned with corporate strategy in an era of digitisation and accelerated innovation. One local organisation which has managed to close the strategy-to-execution gap with a robust innovation strategy is the award-winning National Library Board (NLB), a statutory board established in 1995 to play a defining role in setting up a world-class library system in Singapore. If one looks at the innovation strategy development process as a series of cascading stages where each stage derives from or acts upon the results of the preceding stage, NLB managed to ask the right questions and decisively followed up step by step.