The Challenge of Innovation

The challenge facing many companies in the XXIst century is the need to stay relevant and innovative in a fast-changing world. 

One of these companies is Smart Axiata, a Malaysian telecommunication company, established in Phnom Penh back in 2009. In seven years, the company has grown from 45 employees up to 900+, from building its competitive advantage focused on fresh innovation and affordable prices in the Cambodian market. There is, however, a difference between reaching the #1 position in the telecommunications market and sustaining itself as #1. The transition to being #1 is Smart's greatest challenge. 

Acting at our greatest to be our greatest 

To tackle this challenge and stay at the top, Smart hired our team from Leadapreneur to take them on a 12-week innovation journey through one of our programmes: the Corporate Innovation Accelerator, also know as the "CIA". The CIA for those in the known, is a structured process that enables employees to lead agile innovation in their companies, and brings a positive ROI through i-projects. Each CIA's is uniquely individualized to the company's reality and outcomes (not standardized workshops), focused on changing the managers' beliefs, behaviours and culture (not just on transferring knowledge) and results in instant implementation, leading to real and sustained improvements (not short-term effect).

These outcomes are achieved throughout this straight-forward six-step journey:

In the first phase of the programme, our consultants invest time and energy in finding out about the realities of the company in order to customize the training and make it relevant and meaningful to the participants. The objective of the following phases of the programme, is to take the participant beyond the theory of innovation and into direct practice by providing them the opportunity to identify a key challenge they want to address within the company. Identifying key problems and providing practical solutions to them based on their internal knowledge, expertise and creative brain cells is what sets the CIA apart from other traditional leadership programmes. 

Making it count

At Leadapreneur we believe in agile innovation, which is characterized by creating a new idea, testing it, and making it useful to the user. "Things have to move fast to keep their momentum", says co-Founder and Managing Director Jan Bartscht, "and in the same way, risk and uncertainty are part of the innovation process." 

The idea is that once these processes are understood, accepted and integrated, you allow innovation to become part of the company's DNA and something that its employees strive for on a regular basis. 

Smart making it count during the Discover Phase

For me, it was about thinking beyond my usual area of expertise and open my mind to new possibilities

 A participant responded this when asked about what was the most challenging part of the day.

​Innovation is not something that comes naturally, it has to be nurtured and given space to come out of employee's minds and into reality. Providing this creative space and thinking in solutions is what we strive to provide at Leadapreneur, identifying key trends happening in 2016 to get them think about the bigger picture. 

Based on this, the participants completed the first challenge of their journey: identifying a challenge in their company that they want to innovate on. The next step will be to get the creative hat on and think of a solution. It is the implementation of that solution that generates value to their company. 

Keep following their journey on this blog and comment bellow if you would like to find out more about this programme - we always love to hear from companies eager to take themselves to the next level to stay relevant.  
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Next step: DESIRE. ​