Achieving innovation fitness is a journey- to get there we often have to manage the switchbacks as we build our capabilities and capacities to innovate.
- Getting Started – Understanding the Needs & Imperatives of Innovation Fitness
- Why we must travel this critical path for Innovation.
- The meaning of dynamic capabilities and innovation fitness landscapes
- Merging the theory with practical reality to produce new outcomes and positive results.
- Focusing on resources and performance – why is this important
- The problem is knowing what we have and what we really need
- The Fuel of Innovation Performance – the dynamics of innovation
- A sharper, clearer focus on innovation resources to meet strategic need
- What is known about resources to sustain, enhance performance
- Knowing and aligning your strategic criteria – for sound innovation approaches
- Getting innovation within the right context of your business
- Moving your resources in the right direction
- Getting even more specific – quantification and qualification
- Recognizing the building of scale, change rates and dynamics that happen over time and why we need to constantly build our innovation capabilities.
- Developing the resources to meet the need – structured, focused, clarified by bringing out the necessary discussion.
- An illustrative scenario for a directional innovation fitness landscape map
- Recognizing resources can come beyond the firm and bringing these in successfully. Managing within a more open environment.
- Achieving mutual dependencies to support; recognizing the hindering ones
- Being aware of the impact of different scenarios in the management of innovation
- Building the Innovation Fitness Machine – reinforcing feedback, identifying needs
- Recognizing the current status, spotting emerging patterns, seeing spaces and gaps and identifying solutions.
- Beginning the ‘adaptive walk’ to get to higher fitness points needed to compete.
- Clarifying the complementary resources, looking to embed new routines quickly and set up follow through approaches.
- Introducing natural tensions into the system to trigger ‘step change’
- Resource dependence climate, culture, diversity, intensity and uniqueness
- Reinforcing feedback – watching for dangers, managing the machine capacity, removing the brakes selectively
- Shifting your resources need not deplete or force other people to compete for them – working through the tensions within teams and silos.
- Matching resource dynamics with the innovation value chain & life cycle stages
- Simulation modelling the ‘what ifs’ and ‘why’
- The Strategic Architecture – designing the system to perform as needed
- The step process for designing and executing the architecture design
- Diagnosing performance challenges and road blocks – resolving, moving on
- Lining up the solutions is not a linear process and needs careful management
- Addressing the effects of intangibles in the Strategic Architecture.
- The Hard Face of Soft(er) factors – the hidden power of intangible resources
- Clarifying the impact of the intangibles and recognizing time, climate and conditions are significant contributors to innovation activities.
- The different rivalry types: internal and external, inter department, inter projects and working through resolutions to these.
- Reflecting feelings and expectations, addressing all the different needs
- Measuring the tougher parts of intellectual capital
- The real value of your intangible resources
- Recognizing the value of hidden innovation and spotting its occurrence
- Entering into Competitive Battle – the Dynamics of Rivalry, the Uniqueness of You
- Recognizing, developing, capturing, transforming, avoiding and out – manoeuvring
- Your point of choosing what, where, how and when to compete.
- Building capabilities that are unique to you and hard to replicate
- Building sustainability into the innovation equation as ongoing
- Extending the turf, exploiting the situation, pushing beyond, seeking partners.
- Building and Testing Capabilities to Perform
- Measuring capabilities through different fitness levels and scale.
- Learning to build capabilities as ‘ongoing’ and evolving for changing needs
- Re-Structuring the process for dealing with the dynamics of change
- Knowing the points of impact on performance to enable recognition and reality
- Managing innovation performance progressively across the spectrum of business need through testing and extending capability learning.
- Building from personal to team to organizational learning in measured steps
- Recognizing the role of leadership, achieving strategic alignment and working on broadening out innovation competence at different organizational levels.
- Keeping the innovation fitness wheels turning, keeping your eyes on the road
- Resolution of conflicting goals, control and structure
- Dissecting conflicting positions, resolving impasse
- Knowing the limits of human engagement
- Goals, controls and measurements can dominate and strangle
- Keeping the measurements simple and clear
- Managing innovation as a critical strategic resource
- Merging the results into a greater alignment to Strategy and Approaches
The end result is looking to generate your fitness landscape
As you can see this is applying a very comprehensive approach, a fairly ‘intensive’ one. This might alter individually after some clear piloting, learning and experimentation undertaken. Building innovation capabilities takes time; they are complex, highly structured and multi-dimensional. Any structured approach to tackling innovation takes time and considerable commitment.
