June, 2018 - Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence

Learning Platforms and Personal Learning Pathways

My mind has been swirling around the significant changes taking place around learning. Not just in the time we have available, suggested recently as 25 minutes per week to stop and learn but in the variety of ways we can learn. Clearly, many of these are digital to construct, so as to apply the more modern design process that works for each of us individually, at our time of need.

I have been struck by the emphasis on personal learning and development. We still get very caught up in the need for scale yet it is the ability and flexibility to design these to our individual pathway that becomes “the order of the day”. The constant struggle is for each of us in simply stopping to focus, finding the time and the last thing you can afford to do, is take an ad-hoc approach to this, it needs a structured design.

This is where external facilitation might help Continue reading “Learning Platforms and Personal Learning Pathways”

The world is working within increased complexity, are you?

The challenges of managing in today’s worlds are tough, very tough and demanding. It is so volatile, potentially disruptive and full of risk. Organizations are simply struggling to shed their clothes in the 20^th century and find a way to smoothly manage to become more adaptable and agile in form. They are adjusting to offer consistent responses to instability in the most effective ways, to keep adapting to the consistent market challenges, and in so doing profiting from meeting that latest challenge or disruptive opportunity.

The problem is you simply can’t manage this smoothly, it will be highly disruptive as the organization re-equips themselves and learns, often in the hardest way possible, through failure, through experimentation, through risk-taking. Innovation is increasingly seen as the pathway forward in capturing growth and grabbing any advantage, even if these are increasingly transient. Yet as we look towards building our innovation capabilities we need to work in totally different ways and see ‘things’ in new ways.

Innovation in itself is also a force of instability and we need to find ways to embrace much of its uncertainties by understanding its dynamics. We need to have a major shift in our organizational thinking, needed to find the appropriate new balance within those dual ‘tensions’ of ‘stability’ through efficiency, with its opposite, ‘change’ driven by innovation. It is these dynamic forces within the world we work that need us to respond by building that capacity for managing those ‘dynamic’ innovation capabilities, that today’s markets are requiring and organizations are needing to master.

Continue reading “The world is working within increased complexity, are you?”

Reworking our middle to achieve a new innovative shape

Reworking our middle

Let’s admit it; our middle management needs a radical makeover, a new fitness regime to make us far more innovation fit. Most organizations do need to change their middles as they are far from that ‘fit for 21st-century purpose’ in a constantly changing, challenging, more open innovating world.

Here is a way to “flip” this around but lets first recognize the problem(s)

The general argument goes that the middle manager is so pressured to focus on the delivery of short-term results that all their efforts are centered far more on delivering ‘just’ an effective organization, one that focuses on driving out any excess or leeway, reduce the variations, constantly dampening down potential risk and uncertainty. Continue reading “Reworking our middle to achieve a new innovative shape”

Building a Strong Innovation Advocacy In Practice

I have been a strong champion for innovation for a number of years. It has become my overriding passion, interest, and source of inspiration. I research continuously in this area, as innovation is restless, it never stays the same, it is always evolving.

My worry though continues, innovation gets treated often as an add-on, often overridden, to the more established practices within organizations. Innovation does need a different mindset, metrics, and operational practice to be able to yield its true potential.

I have been thinking for some time about the advocacy of innovation, turning my intent into purpose and positioning, by becoming a more dedicated source of essential knowledge for innovators as a guide, mentor, and catalyst for accelerating performance.

The timing now seems right so to launch this dedicated posting website under http://www.guide4innovating.wordpress.com

My intent derives from four beliefs I can offer something of innovating value to others

To be known for knowing something and contributing this into your thinking
Having a clear independent expertise in innovation allows for ‘degrees’ of freedom
A wish to be a “go to” trusted authority drives my level of performance
Being seen as a specialist for innovation understanding can be a real catalyst to you.

My purpose and positioning has five points of innovation value

The wish to unlock the knowledge within and add even more to yours
To find and set the true purpose and rhythm of innovation for clients
My ability for assessing capabilities, capacities and designs to innovate
A belief that coaching, mentoring, guiding and advising accelerates innovation
I can differentiate, determine and deliver innovation to specific needs

I see many areas of innovation activity that are managed poorly, where the linkage has not been fully established and it often remains sub-optimal. Innovation is a distinct management practice and does need this strong advocacy that I wish to bring to the table on behalf of clients, ones that want to accelerate their innovation understanding and performance and achieve those higher returns that are available to them, if they invest the time and commitment.

I really think I can help! Can I catalyze your thinking?

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Mentoring versus Coaching for Innovation

I bet a lot of people get caught out in not knowing the differences between Mentoring and Coaching. Equally, when you are in the coaching mode you need to guard against moving over to the mentoring mode unless it is conscious ways. Understand the differences becomes important.

Why do we need to mentor or coach today? We are facing highly competitive environment changes. The key to the need of having facilitation is to bring fresher, more innovative and leading-edge solutions into any innovation thinking but it is often all about the blending of experiences and the relationship dynamics of those involved in this set of dialogues.

“For fresh vision and momentum, I need your past like you need mine”

The objectives are to deliver innovation understanding in both mentoring and coaching approaches Continue reading “Mentoring versus Coaching for Innovation”

So I keep asking myself “What is the role of social media in innovation?”

Social media haunts us all. For many years you first become aware, then very aware and then fully aware that social media is changing our lives.

Let me confess: I am not alone I am sure but I seem to be presently suffering from Social Media Return Dilemma. There I’ve said it, it is out in the open, “I suffer from SMRD”.

To be honest I am struggling with social media in innovation, struggling to get my head around it for my business, for me for a long time. It often seems overwhelming, do you feel the same? I worried about this years ago and still do. What is the best social media to have as part of your communicating strategy, how much time do you network?

It starts with a realization

I can see daily the amazing power that social networking can provide, it is certainly eating into my day, more and more. Is this a good thing or bad? What suffers, what benefits? The time issue has to increasingly be managed, and I have yet to come up with a repeatable plan to manage social media consistently each day into my work. I get so much from viewing, commenting, relating and learning.

I don’t have a clear enough strategy for it or where to direct my social media energy, does anyone? It continues to evolve in front of our eyes, are you cresting the social media wave or swimming like crazy to get back up on the surfing board?

I am still learning, experimenting, exploring through a combination of writing blogs, contributing to others, updating my connections, tweeting sometimes like crazy, publishing, promoting or simply clicking on a retweet or offer a “like” back to the author or the one that has publicized something that interests me. Often I do wonder all this frenetic energy leads to what end. It does nag away at me?

Continue reading “So I keep asking myself “What is the role of social media in innovation?””

Understanding Your Innovation Capital- Well Do You?

If someone came to you and asked the question: “tell me what makes up your financial capital?” I expect you could answer this fairly comfortably. It might need a little added help from your finance department but you could produce and show significant details that we are all ‘schooled’ to understand and generally have accepted, as under common definitions and standard practice.

Our businesses are measured constantly on their financials, we produce a constant flow of reporting documents that provide useful insight and allow for a more informed judgement by present and future investors on the health of the company.

We are ‘wedded’ to our financials and ignore the real value within our organizations of all the other critical capitals that generate and strengthen the business, yet these are the MOST valuable to leverage.

Continue reading “Understanding Your Innovation Capital- Well Do You?”

Questioning internally those product failures

Failure

There is a variety of different views on our product failure rates. According to some, the failure rate for new products launched for instance in the grocery sector is 70 to 80 percent in the US. For smaller US food businesses launching new products, the success rate is even lower around 11 percent.

These are really high failure rates but is this a myth or reality? How does your organization evaluate product failures? Do you really want to talk about them?

Organizations continue to push for business growth by launching wave upon wave of new products, yet many end up as just hardly ripples that simply fade away, into incremental revenue and nothing else. Continue reading “Questioning internally those product failures”

Time starved, innovation lacking

Today most executives seem to be time starved. They are constantly reacting to daily events, for fix focusing and fixing short-term performance. This applies to the top executive down to the most junior.

This time-starved environment has real implications for innovation.

If we don’t sit down and think through issues and implication of our present performance around innovation, how can we close the gaps and improve it? We just simply don’t seem to have a more systematic, connected road map within our thinking that points the way to the improving longer-term as we keep doing this ‘reacting’ only.

We have such a limited amount of time; to pause, to evaluate, or redesign. We equally don’t feel capable to simply assign this over, even to outsiders to help. We are far too challenged and driven, often far too inbreed into thinking that “our solutions can only be the only solutions to our problems or challenges”.

Continue reading “Time starved, innovation lacking”

Struggling with counting ALL the sums of our capital

Organizations have been focused for far too long around the importance of financial capital. It determines and drives organizations destinies. We are caught in a constant focus upon our achieving a return on our (financial) capital as our measuring criteria. Organizations strive for improving their ROCE, RONA, IRR, EVA and a host of other financial measures.

As Clayton Christensen has been arguing the agenda of organizations begins and ends with the “search for numbers”. I think there is a time for changing this, we need to search for the knowledge that makes-up eventually the numbers.

There has been a distant voice for some time putting forward the need to appreciate and value the other capitals sitting within organizations. Much of the discussions have been housed under the term “intellectual capital” which denotes the sum of knowledge made up and contributed by our human assets, our organizational structures and our relationships that are developed.

These are the ‘capitals’ that transform into economic value through organization action. It is the financial capital that simply finances this.

Continue reading “Struggling with counting ALL the sums of our capital”