June, 2016 - Innovation Thinking and Resources

Future Innovation demands a different approach

By @paul4innovating June 23, 2016Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking

I certainly believe we are in need of a fresh approach to innovation. We are facing unprecedented challenges, sluggish growth and increasing competition from unexpected sources.

We need to increasingly deliver better end results; as more distinctive, bolder and creative, delivering greater value to our customers’ needs. Can we change our thinking to achieve this?

Let me offer some of my thoughts on why we need to reinvent our innovation management.

The power of technology, software and the use of the cloud is combining in new powerful ways. We are looking for greater data capture and analytics and this is offering us a very different set of options than in the past. The framing of the innovation potential has to be altered. Altered in different products. services and business models. But will it?

I keep arguing we all need to seek out innovation alignment

By @paul4innovating June 20, 2016Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Foster Performance, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Polymers

All too often strategy is not influencing the behaviours and outcomes around innovation, it is simply allowing them to be left to chance.

Innovation is being ‘pushed down’ the organisation for others to interpret and offer their answers. They execute to their own understanding and often the innovations end up as not strategically aligned.

That is plainly wrong, not knowing the strategic objectives it is one of the principle causes of innovation failure and requires fixing.

This poor strategic understanding creates a lack of alignment and directing innovation. If an organisation lacks top leadership engagement it becomes, for many, the reason why they seem to just simply ‘limp’ along in their innovation activity, delivering ‘simply’ incremental outcomes. The more radical innovations can never emerge if these do not have the close alignment to the Corporate vision or objectives and leadership engagement..

One pressing need in Innovation understanding.

By @paul4innovating June 15, 2016Capabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Fitness Landscaping Regimes

There is a really pressing need in Innovation to tackle and resolve and that’s our capabilities to innovate.

Yet do we know which are the critical factors for sustaining innovation success? What capabilities are needed to be built? What are not so necessary and will occur more naturally due to us finding these dynamic ones? Also, what capabilities that are in place we can stop investing money into on the mistaken belief they contribute to innovation.

It is becoming increasingly vital to understand those critical innovation capabilities for an organisation to have in place, so as to deliver on the goals and vision required to grow the business and maintain its health for it to prosper and thrive.

The Orchestrator needs to orchestrate your innovation capabilities.

By @paul4innovating June 13, 2016Capabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Exploratory Walks & Needs

To deliver innovation, sustaining innovation, it needs to be built on dynamic skills, then you have to learn how you can orchestrate the capabilities you have, with those you have to bring in.

Building on those that give the necessary dynamic result you are looking for; to purposefully build what is needed to deliver the required result.

I have reconfigured my thinking around what will influence the evolution leading from building ‘just’ internal innovation capabilities to a whole ‘network effect’ from these.

This work just gets more exciting as it evolves.

It relies on how you purposefully build and construct these capabilities and competencies. The orchestration is fundamentally dynamic, full of uncertainties but the need is still to connect the parts to deliver the right result. We need to orchestrate, to build and then conduct and deliver the right results, to the innovation goals we seek.

Applying innovation thinking in different horizons

By @paul4innovating June 11, 2016Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation3 Comments

In the past few days, I have had some exchanges on twitter with Jairo H Venegas and Ralph-Christian Ohr on different thinking around the three horizon methodology. We share similar views on its value and partly how it can be applied.

Ralph and I exchange constantly and occasionally meet up together. Actually, we need another meeting Ralph to catch up and explore these mutual innovation value points.

Ralph in a reply to Jairo suggested this: “That’s why a portfolio approach is so important” – with his take here: bit.ly/1Rn5Svq under his excellent Model for Integrative Innovation article.He ‘talks’ of cornerstones and offers different premises to anchor these a little more.

The dynamic points of innovation understanding

By @paul4innovating June 8, 2016Capabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Exploratory Walks & Needs, Fitness Landscaping Regimes, Outcomes & Expectancies

Have you ever studied a map in a hilly or mountainous terrain? When you are studying the terrain, you have to survey the landscape and then decide how to cross. You need to be aware of what to avoid and what will help you map out a successful pathway. You need to optimize, evaluate and determine your best options.

Determining future innovation outcomes requires a greater understanding of what capabilities are more useful to develop, those that offer a more dynamic capacity. Do you know yours?

Can you separate these from the many you have that fail to give innovation impact?

We never start from a blank innovation canvas.

None of us has a ‘blank’ innovation canvas, we have developed a present position; one that is built on a legacy of past work and from our needs built up from our innovation activity, also in the past. As these develop we make choices, we sometimes become locked into certain structures, systems and processes, so we find it often highly difficult on how we are going to change, to move from one position to a different one – traversing the landscape to achieve better solutions to meet different goals that meet the present or future needs.