How can enterprise software architects balance innovation and stability?

As an Solution Architect, it's our job to ensure that systems are stable, while keeping itself open for Innovation & Experiments. Architecture building blocks play major role in achieving this objective. The modularity & granularity of a building block will define the modularity of entire architecture. Take example of monolithic services vs micro services. Micro services, being very granular and loosely coupled with beach other, gives ample space to innovate while ensuring stability. Whereas, monolithic approach doesn't do that. Hence build modular building blocks to build a modular architecture.

Strong implementation of DevOps pipeline helps in faster deployment and faster rollback too. Living in Agile world, where requirements change at an increased frequency, if deployment and testing are not automated, it will certainly generate hindrance and will leave no scope for Innovation & experimentation. Whereas, a strong DevOps pipeline will help in quickly deploying & validating the changes, giving ample time & space to try out new things. Leveraging Agile approach of delivery, will help in getting quicker feedback from stockholders on new ideas.

Technical debts are real debts. They grow with interest that too, in compound fashion. Implementing systems in production, with technical debts, will make it more difficult to innovate in future because of 2 reasons: 1. You'd first prefer investing the effort and time in getting rid of technical debt instead of innovating something new. System, with technical debt is itself unstable and you'd need to first bring in the stability then think about innovate. 2. With technical debts present in system, one cannot be sure how the innovation and experiments react with the it , leading to lack of confidence and unable to produce clean designs. Technical debts impact future design decisions.

In addition to this it becomes difficult to manage over a period of time and creates unecessary overhead which becomes difficult to keep.

Innovation is consistent in our business but their has to be a convergence of the innovation and the business outcome. Not all innovation is applicable to your specific requirements or strategic incentives. It is imperative that innovation cis positive disrupting platform for improvement of business operation. Customers buy hardware and software to run the business so any innovation has to run the business better, more efficient or lower overall cost. Due diligence is required for any change and I often instability is not caused by the technology but the people who implemented it.

Open-ended innovation doesn't serve any purpose. The business process innovation by the Enterprise Software Architect should be in line with the vision, mission, and organisational goals. Stability can be attained if the innovative solution helps strengthen the organisation's core competency to seamlessly meet current and future customer preferences and market direction.

I don't think "innovation" and "stability" are mutually exclusive hereby requiring a balancing act. Deploying stable solutions speaks to the quality and integrity of your software delivery practices coupled with run-time assurance controls and processes for your deployed solution. Innovation is just the ideation and subsequent designs that precede software builds. Two separate phases of your solution delivery process. No need to compromise one for the other.