At the helm of each failed company was a leadership team whose primary purpose was to deliver a financial return for the company's stakeholders and to do so year after year. Then one day these companies lost their edge and got beat. The market shifted away from them, their customers sought something different, a new competitor stole a chunk of their market share, or they simply failed to keep abreast of the market. In a nutshell, they failed to innovate.
Innovation is the key to prosperity in competitive markets. Every significant business venture traces its roots to an original spark of innovation. In most instances, the founder invented an experience or product with unique attributes that was superior to the available options.
Innovations are the result of a rigorous creation process in which an idea is tested and rebuilt over successive iterations until what remains is more right than the available alternatives.
It requires two ingredients that are relatively scarce in established companies today. First, any innovation must be predicated on detailed and accurate information about the intended end state as well as what the enterprise is capable of producing. Which leads to the second ingredient: innovation endeavors require a champion--an individual with the clout and awareness to shepherd meaningful change efforts.
Translating change efforts into process terms provides several benefits:
The scope of an initiative is clearly identified leaving no room for confusion and eliminating the need for initiative owner to beat the bushes for clarity.
The very processes that must be included in the design and execution of the initiative are spelled out in the initiative itself.
Using processes as the basis of communicating change initiatives creates a foundation for initiative management.
A process-focused enterprise is an organization that has adopted the process-management philosophy to manage its resources and also defines improvement initiatives in the language of process adjustments. Operating as a process-focused enterprise requires the implementation of three key elements--a process structure, a governance structure and an innovation plan.
Source: David Hamme: Customer Focused Process Innovation: Linking Strategic Intent to Everyday Execution