2014 - Innovation Thinking and Resources

The value of the visiting consultative fireman

By @paul4innovating April 27, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Improve Collaboration & Communication, innovation execution delivery, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

I was reflecting on the value and role of consultants and have written here, here and here on this.

These thoughts have covered the topics of suggesting different consulting models, exploring the shifts taking place in consulting and where consulting can contribute.

Then I offered a post late last year under the title of “client engagement- full of whipped cream and lumpy gravy?”

So in this post I will reflect and look at the visiting fireman here, the ones I experienced in the corporate world. I still believe they are far from endangered species.

Consultants hold a specific fascination for me, they come in all shapes and sizes, offering a bewildering array of solutions for your business.
For many clients, consultants have become ‘totally essential’ yet for others a necessary evil.

Today with far less resource within our business to call upon and coping with increasing pressure on time there is also this total reluctance to employ someone on the books, it is better to bring it in on an ‘as and when’ basis.

Keep it lean and mean, charge it off against that years operating expenses, don’t bring it onto the longer-term books.

Mostly the consultants knowledge leaves when they do

There are no easy innovation answers.

By @paul4innovating April 20, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

In response to a recent post of mine, Tobias Stapf on the Social Innovation Europe LinkedIn networking group, pointed me to a really good report “Innovation Is Not the Holy Grail” and

I really have appreciate it. I wanted to draw out some useful learning from this report and useful reminders here in this post that there is no easy answers in innovation, social or business related.

The report outlines the difficulties of enabling innovation in social sector organizations. In this review the authors undertook exploring what enables organization capacity for continuous innovation in established social sector organizations, that operate at an efficient scale, delivering products and services.

We are not facing up to the big Societal challenges of today?

By @paul4innovating April 18, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Sustainability, Tackling innovation

Perhaps why innovation feels somewhat flat (well for me) is our organizations and societies are utterly failing to allow us all to step up in innovation to tackle those huge societal issues, those massive, growing problems that are swirling all around us.

We need to shake out of our lethargy and really begin to attempt to solve the real issues of our time. Some organizations are clearly working on and trying to draw attention and gain greater engagement but we need a much greater concerted effort to focus on the big societal challenges.

Global warming, rising health issues, finally cracking cancer, malaria, dementia, finding different solutions to the ageing within society. How are we going to tackle the rapidly depleting natural resources, the future conflicts over water, food, or energy . These are big, hairy, audacious gaps to be resolved.

Many are avoiding the need too stare hard into the future as we are not re-equipping everyone with skills that combine inventiveness, innovation and creativity that contributes into their communities, we have got stuck in the “me”. A reality of depletion is racing towards us and it is not a pretty sight.

So are we all all suffering innovation disillusionment?

By @paul4innovating April 15, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Foster Performance, gaining innovation momentum, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

You get this increasing sense that the ‘fizz’ has gone out of the innovation bubbly.

The innovation party presently feels a little flat.

The numerous delicious canapés to choose from are turning up at the edges as we are becoming disillusioned, just being fed on a present unexciting incremental innovation diet, lacking any real substance.

People are milling around with that bored look on their faces, some are also slumped down checking their watch or smartphones on when is the best time to cut out and find somewhere else to be, rather than be here. Has the fizz gone from innovation?

Are we being moved by innovation anymore?

Is innovation becoming a boring place to be seen for hanging out and being involved? Are we all feel that there is a less creative buzz going around?

Perhaps, it depends for each of us yet collectively you might agree we do feel something is definitely missing. The excitement has left the room, innovation has become too predictable.

Gaining idea engagement can be a five step process.

By @paul4innovating April 9, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Foster Performance, Fresh thinking, innovation execution delivery, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Polymers, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

I have been recently revisiting Everett Roger’s work on diffusion and adoptions recently for providing us with a better place for engagement in innovation approaches.

I’ve been evaluating if it has the same relevance in my mind in our more connected world, where speed, knowledge and exchanges are measured in microseconds.

This reminded me of a suggestion I made some time back and I thought I’d ‘air’ this again for engaging with others.

We constantly fall into the trap of not providing our listeners enough of a reason to ‘buy into’ our thoughts. We forget to either pitch it to their mental framework or we do not provide a set of compelling arguments that allows our idea a mutual recognition of its value or structure, to take it forward and transform it into something tangible and valuable.

I think using Rogers’s rate of diffusion principles you can end up offering a fairly powerful positioning statement.

Learning favours the brave who respond faster

By @paul4innovating April 6, 2014Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Foster Performance, gaining innovation momentum, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

The challenges we are facing today seem to be coming faster at us, more complex to decipher and then re-evaluate how we should respond.

To achieve a faster response we certainly need to educate the organization more than ever.
We need to absorb more, we need to encourage learning more especially to pursue innovation.

We need to actively set up learning ways within our organizations to establish their abilities to recognize the value of new, external information (knowledge), assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends.

Innovation within the organization needs not just greater recognition of its vital parts, but also of its status as a value-enhancing and organizational life-changing event that we need to move towards increasingly in more organized ways.

Innovation needs to be recognized as a clear discipline, new expertise that is as powerful as Marketing became some decades ago.

Organizations are in a constant dilemma of the innovation fit.

By @paul4innovating March 28, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, gaining innovation momentum, innovation execution delivery, Innovation strategy, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

The issue of “where does innovation fit?” is one of the most difficult ones to address in many organizations. It seems to fit uncomfortably for many.

At the top of our organizations they ‘require’ innovation but will often not want the potential disruption this might entail.

Yet the organization today is being challenged like never before, it has gone from managing the predictable business to responding to the unpredictable, more opportunistic and alert to change, a place innovation can fit within the need to respond to this different environment.

This is the final post in the series that has focused on the innovation work mat components

Are you evolving the innovation function and design

By @paul4innovating March 26, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, gaining innovation momentum, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

source: prophet.com — image credit www.prophet.com

Organizations are struggling to forge a new path in innovation function and design that captures opportunities fast and also exploits the increasing need of being adaptive and flexible.

Organizations are looking at structures for their innovation activity that are taking a more agile and focused approach, wanting to push for constantly accelerating the process. New practices are emerging.

This is demanding more radical redesigns of the function, processes and structures around innovation. Innovators are being more challenged.

Against this need for new, more radical designs there still lies that underlying concern, often at the top of our organizations, on how to manage innovation risk without significant organisational disruption.

There is this lingering fear that pushing for more radical innovation can create significant upheaval within the organization. Innovation is being challenged by the view of “we want predictable innovation but radical enough to make sure we grow.”

Innovation has to manage within this conflicting message. It is through the well-designed system, processes and function that this can happen but this needs redesigning fairly radically to adjust to today’s world of wanting innovation faster than ever.

Successful Innovation needs a common language, context and communicating

By @paul4innovating March 23, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, gaining innovation momentum, innovation execution delivery, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

The story of Babel — The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563)

People disconnect because they lack what is needed to connect! Innovation thrives from the knowledge and you need to make sure this is allowed to flow.

To achieve those essential knowledge connections, you need a shared understanding of innovation, that common sense of purpose as a framework. This will though, always stay a work-in-progress.

You need to begin to build a common language of greater understanding. We need to unite around innovation. Imagine if you work consciously to put knowledge in the hands of people willing to make innovation happen, what the potential might be?

Give people the power of the context for their innovation engagement and that shifts everything to give them a clearer shape and meaning. You are laying out the conditions, criteria and circumstances, giving innovation its foundations.

Measuring and motivating the innovation elephant

By @paul4innovating March 21, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Antibodies, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Innovation strategy, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

I often think of the parable of “The Elephant and the Blind Men” when I get into discussions about measuring innovation.

What are truths, what are the fallacies? The parable implies that one’s often subjective experience can be true on your need, but not necessarily the other person’s view of their understanding of value.

You get, as the end result, a failure to account for other ‘beliefs’ or capture the real value and miss providing broader motivations to encourage the innovation elephant along.

Establishing the right metrics that motivate and yield the result you are looking for is sometimes a tough challenge. You should always start with the bigger picture, organizational needs and then design the metrics and cascade these throughout the organization.