Mary Mesaglio, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, said business leaders need critical skills for navigating new trends and technologies.
"Two basic elemental skills you must nail if you innovate in GenAI or anywhere. Those are how to do push and pull innovation and 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 organisations is anything but easy," Mesaglio said.
Push and pull
"When you're in front of any big new technology or trend, there are two options you can take for how to approach it. And they are called push innovation and pull innovation," Mesaglio said.
She explained that push innovation is technology-led while pull innovation is business-led, starting with the business problem or opportunity.
"The biggest drawback is that you can miss the bigger picture, stay incremental, and miss something fundamentally groundbreaking by just focusing on the needs you can see," she said.
Mesaglio advocates for a hybrid technology-led and business-led approach "to ensure that you are staying grounded in pragmatic problems you actually can solve."
How and why
"As exploring new opportunities and GenAI or some other technology or trend you're innovating, remember to be clear about the why. This is something Gartner calls your AI ambition. Have a good idea of why you're doing what you're doing. And don't be so concerned with having every step mapped out of the how," Mesaglio explained.
She recommends that organisations allow some ambiguity and some emergence.
Full video here
