Exploring Dynamics Within Innovation Landscapes
Patterns of growth- how innovation spreads and grows is taken from a report by Nesta, called “In & Out of Sync”. I like this very much for all innovation understanding but here the emphasis is placed on social innovation.
Although patterns of growth vary in detail, they highlight four necessary conditions for putting innovative products, services and (different) models into practice sustainably and on a large scale:
Once in a while, you have to stop and reflect. Why do I keep banging away at innovation, along with countless others?
Often I feel we are preaching to the converted, or the ones forced to listen just in case they miss something and are suddenly banished to hell, a non-innovating organization.
A place where no one will ever listen to them and this would have been the message to free the shackles and bring them back to innovation salvation.
So here I am standing in the innovation pulpit giving the weekly sermon on innovation beliefs and principles, offering this weekly reading on the (next) ten steps to avoid in that particular sin which we all know you are certainly committing!
Sometimes at the end of the sermon (or article), someone comes up and leaves an offering (comment) that sustains us a little more during the week, as we go about our business, in my case consulting, advising and researching on innovation.
What a hard life we seemingly lead!
So it is one of those rare occasions you recall something truly inspirational and this is what happened to me in going back to one of the best examples of true innovation practised and preached, the “W L Gore way”
It is suggested that economic growth is an outcome of the innovation trajectory we set. Today managing innovation is complex; often success is measured and valued by the creative destruction of others.
The ability to ‘evolve’ is very determinant on the knowledge base, either within a given economy or within a ‘federation’ to bring together as something new, offering more value than what is on offer today.
The combining of the dynamics within innovations parts
Innovation is highly dynamic in its constant change but also in its need of constant co-ordination of its parts.
I’ve been writing a lot recently on different issues that need thinking through for regaining a more sustaining innovation growth engine. Here I wanted to think out loud, about National issues that become more drags and not accelerators to innovation.
I then have tried to identify some of the reasons, and then finish with a personal reflection on the US versus European and some suggested actions needed for improving their innovation activity.
Often we forget to put our own innovation efforts into context, so I’d like to go up to the helicopter view here, maybe it helps us to relate better to some of the external barriers that need equal resolution, as we do often come up against these as we try to innovate within borders. Innovation cannot be contained, it needs harnessing but allowed to ‘move’ where it needs to go.
I was looking through some ‘sage’ advice from McKinsey on managing in a crisis, in really hard times, and one really got me thinking, so I thought I’d share this.
“Use the hard times to concentrate on and strengthen your competitive advantage. If you are confused about this concept, hard times will clarify it.
Competitive advantage has two branches, both growing from the same root. You have a competitive advantage when you take business away from another company at a profit and when your cash costs of doing business are low enough that you survive in hard times.”
This challenged my thinking of competitive advantage but then again hard times certainly do question all our thinking. I always felt it was the uniqueness within, in what you offered, that separates you from your competition. This alters that perspective.
Firstly you have to start out with why you feel a freshening up should be required, should this be radical, distinctive or incremental.
What do you actually want to achieve that takes you closer to your aspirations, not just immediate goals?
Can the way you conduct innovation today meet that strategic challenge? Does it ‘advance’ on your current position?
There are a host of reasons ‘renewal’ might be needed. Today, when markets are especially tough, looking long and hard at what you have and jettisoning what you don’t need becomes essential to reposition yourself as leaner and more flexible.
There are many pressing needs why you have to ‘shape up’. Don’t ignore the need for renewal.
Meeting competition in today’s market or positioning for the ‘forces’ swirling around global competition as it constantly changes the fortune for many does not simply arrive announced.
You need to be prepared, to be alert, and to be agile and fit. We have to create the right environment and now is the time to question many of the ‘established’ approaches.
We need to challenge them with fresher, more up-to-date thinking based on the multiple changes taking place around us constantly as much in our markets is certainly becoming more ‘fluid’, so renewal needs to be thought through irrespective.
The whole issue of innovation productivity is getting more and more one of the key arguments for re-gaining economic growth. The problem becomes the real impact of ‘creative destruction’ that can often go with this.
I recently wrote in a blog (http://bit.ly/mXZjC3 ) called ‘the Risks of Dampening down Innovation Productivity” that with contracting economic performance, innovation performance suffers as well.
I’d like to look at a few of the hidden or even darker sides to this, not because it is simply a Monday blues sort of thing, but there are growing implications if we don’t clarify why ongoing innovation investment is really needed and what it can often cost on society.
The tough economic times we are presently facing
We are faced with some tough times; markets are contracting, business performance is struggling to maintain its previous levels, there is increasing argument we are heading for a double-dip recession, although I feel we are already in this. Jobs are tough to hold onto and even harder to find.
In a recent article I submitted to Social Innovation Europe, they are building and streamlining the social innovation field in Europe, I made some arguments against national borders for social innovation, actually, I’d say any innovation, even in its organizing values.
We simply miss to much in today’s globally connected world.
Let me explain that part here on ‘the why’ that I believe in this:
Innovation is simply not containable within borders
Firstly innovation is not containable within borders; not ideas, not practices, not final concepts.
If we try to simply constrain it, it will never get the traction and momentum often needed from those ‘great ideas’ born locally, to ever grow and scale and achieve their true success.
Nationalized innovations are never seen or valued by others, and even more importantly, they aren’t seen and adopted as ‘our own’ solutions.
I always smile when people talk about the ‘fuzzy’ front end of innovation, fuzzy tells a story but I think we should name the back end of innovation as rugged to tell an equally important story.
This is the end where the ‘last five yards’ separate the winners from the losers.
The race before then has been made up of often huge quantities of stamina, fortitude, planning, exploration and getting into that necessary innovation rhythm to get yourself within sight of the finishing line, the point when the product, service or business model has one final gasp and passes over that internal finishing line.
The critical passing-through and launch phase where the finished concept goes through that clear defining moment, out into judgement day, where we enter that hostile environment, the marketplace, sometimes too loud cheers, sometimes to defining silence.
Welcome to the real world of judgement where those experienced enough in frontier-ship knows the terrain they are passing over, certainly not for the first time and can manage this again to have a further final successful outcome- better sales!
Hitching your wagons and moving out for the first time.
With many of the leading developed and developing countries experiencing a contracting economic performance we are getting caught in a ‘catch 22’ situation and we are dampening down our innovation productivity.
The more our firms do not expand, the lower the innovation productivity rate. The lower the productivity rate, the tougher it becomes to improve standards of living, boost skills, deepen capabilities, keep competitive and find those more distinctive new products to grow the market before competitors do.
Innovation productivity actually raises the competitive game
Innovation productivity is actually a sustaining engine for wealth and job creation surprisingly. The more you improve speed, efficiency and scale you attract others to adopt similar approaches.
The rise in productivity happens when others adopt improved ways to equally compete, the benefits start to spread and this drives innovation productivity.
It goes: the more efficient we become, the more effective and that leads to increased innovation opportunities.