The Dell Technologies Innovation Index reveals 53% of respondents in Malaysia (APJ: 60%; Global: 57%) fear their organisations could be irrelevant in 3-5 years, based on the health of their innovation pipeline and culture. A new global study, polling 6,600 employees across 45+ countries, illustrates why innovation is business critical and how organisations should harness their people, processes, and technologies to innovate effectively. The study polled 1,700 employees from 8 countries in Asia Pacific & Japan (APJ), consisting of Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand.
“Technology continues to be a critical pillar to an organisation’s business strategy to help them transform and grow. The market dynamics create myriad opportunities for businesses. The Innovation Index study illustrates that the vast majority of Malaysian organisations need to make the decision on where they want to be in the immediate future,” said Mak Chin Wah, country manager, Malaysia and general manager, Telecom Systems Business, South Asia, Dell Technologies. “They can do this by aligning their company goals and nurturing a culture of curiosity by leveraging technology, people and processes.”
Innovation is business critical
Through assessing organisations, respondents are placed on an innovation maturity benchmark ranging from Innovation Leaders to Innovation Laggards. Per the analysis, just 18% of Malaysia organisations (APJ: 17%; Global: 18%) can be defined as Innovation Leaders and Adopters. They have an end-to-end innovation strategy and are well placed to navigate headwinds coming from a global recession, supply chain issues, environmental impacts and more, and continue to grow.
In Malaysia, they are 1.4x (APJ: 2.1x; Global: 2.2x) more likely to accelerate their innovation during a recession than Innovation Followers and Laggards (who are more likely to decelerate). This “innovation resilience” (i.e., determination and ability to innovate during tough times) is credited as part of the reason why Innovation Leaders and Adopters are 1.6x (APJ: 2.1x; Global: 1.9x) more likely to experience high levels of revenue growth than (15%+ expected annual revenue growth in 2022) Innovation Laggards and Followers.
As the innovation maturity curve demonstrates, majority of organisations lack a defined innovation strategy (Innovation Laggards and Followers) or are struggling to make gains (Innovation Evaluators). The Innovation Index is a snapshot in time. Organisations can improve by priming their people, processes, and technology for innovation.
People-primed innovation
Organisations need help to develop an innovation culture where all ideas can make a difference and learning through failure is encouraged, based on the following findings:
- 46% (APJ: 59%; Global: 59%) of respondents in Malaysia believe people leave their company because they haven’t been able to innovate as much as they hoped they would.
- 56% (APJ: 63%; Global: 64%) say aspects of their company’s culture is holding them back from being as innovative as they want to be/can be.
Company culture is set and modelled by leadership but 61% (APJ: 73%; Global: 71%) say their leaders are more inclined to favor their own ideas. Some of the top cited personal barriers to innovation are a fear of failure and a lack of confidence to share ideas with leaders.
Process-primed innovation
Similarly, the Innovation Index reveals that businesses are struggling to embed a structured, data-driven innovation process to realise innovation across the organisation. Key findings include:
- 27% of IT decision-makers in Malaysia (APJ: 28%; Global: 26%) say all their innovation efforts are based on data.
- 41% (APJ: 46%; Global: 52%) organisations in Malaysia aren’t aligning innovation projects to company goals. It’s likely, this lack of process and strategy is part of the reason why organisations are struggling to prioritise innovation: the top cited barrier to innovation impacting teams is a lack of time to innovate due to overwhelming workloads – 39% of Malaysian respondents perceived as such (APJ: 40%; Global: 38%).
Technology-primed innovation
The study findings point to the power of technology to enable innovation, and the consequences of falling behind.
The vast majority – 87% of Malaysian respondents (APJ: 84%; Global: 86%) are actively seeking out technologies to help them realise their innovation goal. Conversely, 47% (APJ: 58%; Global: 57%) believe their technology is not cutting-edge and fear they will fall behind their competitors.
The study explores where organisations are making gains and facing obstacles, across five technology catalysts for innovation: multicloud, edge, modern data infrastructure, anywhere-work, and cybersecurity. In nearly all areas, the greatest stumbling block to unlocking that potential is complexity. For instance, too many organisations have arrived at a multicloud environment by happenstance — an amalgamation of cloud platforms, apps, tools etc. The complexity is costing organisations time, money and precious opportunities to innovate.
These struggles are evident in the top cited global technology obstacles to innovation:
- Growing cloud costs
- Difficulties integrating the overall business architecture with the IT infrastructure architecture
- Time and money spent to migrate apps to new cloud environments
- Cybersecurity threats and insecure edge devices
- Lack of IT infrastructure to meet and process data at the edge
To support organisations on their innovation journey, Dell Technologies will share “lessons from Innovation Leaders and Adopters”. Visit www.dell.com/innovationindex for more information and read our executive summary report.
