Maintaining The Innovation Chain

Maintaining the innovation change is both deceptively simple yet exceedingly difficult at the same time.  It's simple because it doesn’t cost a great deal of money to maintain, the key requirement and effort to maintain the innovation chain is simply to maintain a line of open and active communications across the partner network.  It is difficult because keeping a line of open and active communications requires a culture change that embraces the importance of the communications required to maintain the innovation chain. The culture change is the hangup that will lead to the failure and is really the most difficult to ensure over the long term.  The culture change must be allowed the time and the encouragement to success while the change is taking hold and becoming a mainstay of the innovation chain.

Many retailers and their partners embrace the culture change over the short team however do not have the patience to nurture and allow the change to become ingrained and part of the nature of the organization.  In addition to the the partners must have the patience to encourage the same changes in culture across the entire collaborative network in order to allow the change to become part of the network culture. This is very difficult because each partner is at different levels of change and different levels of engagement.  The commitment and engagement is a cyclical factor in maintaining the change and this is also encouraged by the active participation of the partners across the network, along with the resulting benefits derived by the engagement of the partners. This is where the change will most often fail, its not that the partners do not see the benefit, and it's not that the partners do not want to participate,  it is more that the partners feel they cannot sustain both the level of commitment and the level of engagement required to ensure the long term success of the innovation chain.

You see, partners can maintain short bursts of engagement across a large number of partners for a short period of time and these same partners seem to lose their focus and commitment after a period of time if they see no change or improvement in the key measurements.  The partners in the innovation chain must be encouraged to participate and this must be a constant and continuous encouragement to participate otherwise the partners will stop the methods and practices that encourage participation. The partners in the innovation chain will only try for so long without benefits and without the encouragement to participate.  This is a bit of faith that must be practiced so that when one partner is down another picks up the slack and takes on the responsibility for encouraging the others.

Just like everybody has an off day in life, every partner will have the off day or number of days where there must be another partner willing and able to step up and support the innovation chain while the others recuperate.  This is one of the benefits of the innovation chain, every partner does not need to be on their game all the time in order to succeed. The benefits of the collaborative network and the partners in this network is that they will carry each other during the ups and downs to support the demands and the needs of the innovation network.  There is really not a very high cost of entry and yet there can be a very high benefit achieved as a result of the active participation of the partners in the chain.