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 capabilities to beat out the constant threat of competition, meet disruption head on and produce the radical stuff we need to grow and sustain our businesses. This searching for the capabilities that can deliver is getting increasing harder in a more challenging and threatening world of intensified competition.
The question though is this: which are critical, which naturally occur when others begin to be put into place, which has limited or no real effect, or alter the dynamics of our innovation activities? Knowing these and the differences has a real innovators edge, it can help in advancing the ‘return on impact/investment’ (ROII), now that does have real business value in my opinion
Today, we lack this clear system model that draws the critical innovation factors out and gives them their appropriate values so they can be invest into so as to build and strengthen the innovation capacity. Can also the model be ‘pushed’ to equally provide the ability to model different future states and conceive future scenarios through different impact investments and capability needs?
We recognise resources are scarce, so we need to invest in the right ones
We still don’t understand the ‘dynamics’ of innovation, the interdependency of the parts. Which parts have greater impact, which are not so important? Innovation is still not treated company-wide in a holistic way as recognition of the dependencies is poorly understood. This is what needs to change.
What and where do you place your resources to gain greater impact? What is important to recognize as needing additional ‘weight and focus’, what capability and competencies need to have a stronger emphasis and why? How can we identify these, make the innovation process more dynamic yet these embed constantly as routines? What would happen if we ignore certain innovation aspects, what would give greater impact to our business?
Lots of questions that we do need to find answers too.
Greater fitness equates to more value creation potential. The ability to inter-couple landscape entities and exploit individual interactions alters your dynamics to innovate and improve repeatable cycle times and provides for increasing options to explore.
The solution is a framework that shows promise but it needs to go further and advance more into practice. What are the mutual dependencies, how the innovation ‘system’ behaves, what are its more important impact factors which are weaker and what should be considered in the ‘best’ innovation environment?
Building this capabilities to innovation, drawing out the ones that are more dynamic and need the greater focus makes for interesting work. Care to participate and pilot it further?
