Mary Mesaglio, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, shares about being good at innovation, a life skill she believes one has to acquire when exploring any new technology or trend, including generative AI (GenAI).
Mesaglio shares two basic skills necessary to innovate: push and pull innovation and how to balance the how of innovation with the why.
“Anyone struggling with new technologies — GenAI or otherwise — knows that innovation in a corporate world or large public sector organizations is anything but easy. In fact, I sometimes think there is some innovation assassin going around and killing people's ideas inside large organisations so they can never see the light of day. And of course, with everything we are doing in GenAI and all the speed of technology change, that has to change, too,” she shares.
Push and pull innovation
“When you are in front of any big new technology or trend, there are two options you can take for how to approach it. They are called push innovation and pull innovation. Push innovation is technology-led. It starts with the technology. Pull innovation is business-led. It starts with the business problem or the business opportunity that you are focused on,” Mesaglio shares.
Push innovation asks, "What can this technology or set of technologies do for us? What can we do with GenAI?"
While pull innovation is grounded and pragmatic, its biggest drawback, according to Mesaglio, is missing the bigger picture.
“You can stay incremental, and you can miss something very fundamentally groundbreaking by just focusing on the needs you can see,” she explains.
She advocates for a hybrid approach: exploring what technology can do and ensuring groundedness in pragmatic problems it can solve.
Balancing the how and why of innovation
While exploring new technologies, including GenAI, Mesaglio reminds organisations to be clear about the why.
“This is something Gartner calls your AI ambition. Have a good idea of why you are doing what you are doing. Do not be so concerned with having every single step mapped out of the how. Allow for some ambiguity and some emergence, so to speak,” she shared.
Mesaglio believes these two frameworks can help organisations handle unpredictable things that can possibly emerge as they explore new technologies.
Originally posted on Gartner.
