When you climb mountains, the fitter you are the better you climb. Equally the higher one wants to climb (innovation ambition), the harder it becomes to climb to those new levels. Our ability to climb required two clear points of understanding.
Firstly what we are trying to achieve so we get a rough idea of what we want to achieve, in strategic objective, in our innovation goals and in aligning them. Secondly we require knowledge, a clear working knowledge of how innovation can work for us.
We learn by exploring, the more peaks we cover we improve our knowledge and experience. We build our knowledge landscape. The more we understand each other, the more we can collectively climb and scale our innovation fitness. The more we learn and scale the more we can explore sub peaks on smaller, experimental levels, all contributing to our growing knowledge and fitness to innovate.
Exploring the rugged terrain early helps.
The terrain is identifying the opportunities or possibilities a ‘field’ holds for us. The more we can survey, the more we pick up patterns, insights and understanding. As we begin to map these out we begin to appreciate the height of the efforts (in this case our mountains) to clarify the intensity and ruggedness of the terrain we have to traverse and manage to get to that peak. The number of peaks we wish to scale or need to can tell us how diverse a challenge this might become. The more we can map these out, the more we can identify what we need in making this happen. Knowing the correct innovation type, the capabilities and capacities to build and deliver certainly helps makes us more effective, especially when resources are scarce.
The more we have insights for innovation the more we can build the right fitness models or regimes. Equally the more we survey, the more our competitors come into clearer focus, the better we can predict what they are doing themselves.
This adds up progressively to a fitness map to innovate
All of this adds up to identifying the fitness to innovate. The level of appropriate capabilities and capacities needed to support this venture. We help identify the correct type and number of activities that are appropriate through different protocols, workshops and techniques
Mapping out your innovation capabilities to the task at hand enables you to understand and relate to what is needed. Innovation Fitness Landscapes identify the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts- the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain. The greater the ‘fitness’ transforms your landscape potential into accelerating opportunities into tangible outcomes.
Higher value potential and rate of intensity determines need.
These critical factors give higher value potential or ‘peaks’ that are more valuable to your needs. The more ‘rugged’ the landscape can also determine the greater fitness for the rate of innovation. The height of the peaks in these landscapes illustrates how intense the innovation challenge is, and the number of critical peaks shows how diverse it potentially is.
The ability to identifying the emerging patterns provides the need to act and invest, making adaptive walks, so as to move you to the higher fitness points where innovation viability is enhanced and needed to be so as to resolve the challenges faced. 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.
Fitness landscapes provide increased understanding of not just your existing position but ‘point’ to where to place your resource to improve your innovative capacity. Mapping these clearly and knowing the innovation rugged terrain you have to travel provides the appropriate focus and intensity you require closing the gap and achieving peak performance.
