Exploring Dynamics Within Innovation Landscapes
How do we show the real difference that innovation can provide?
I believe we have eight needs to achieve.
Each of us will arrive at our own personal understanding of what this “all means”.
Innovation is about achieving difference so if we all arrived at the same point of understanding then we actually are defeating ourselves from the very beginning
So what are these eight ‘triggering’ points? Briefly:
All companies talk about innovation and its growing importance but it seems to me very few succeed in actually doing it on a repeatable scale.
So have you ever asked what inhibits innovation? What would drive innovation success? What aspects of innovation are critical to have so innovative growth can be achieved? Where should a company place its emphasis to gain both an improving impact on its performance and strengthen its innovation capabilities?
Have you ever evaluated your capabilities, competencies, and capacities to innovation in light of a changing landscape?
One where competitors have gained new ground or you have been confronted with a more disruptive product that threatens your established position or has even the potential to threaten your very existence? Your ability to respond to changing positions are often determined by knowing which capabilities and capacities you can call upon and leverage for finding new solutions that accelerate and innovate your position to respond and stay competitive.
If we take the view:
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.
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.
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.
There was a report written back in 2013 entitled and under, “The New Normal: Competitive advantage in the digital economy” written for the Big Innovation Centre, an initiative of The Work Foundation and Lancaster University that I would recommend your time to read.
I often go back to this as it provides a real source of understanding of the shifts being undertaken within our organizations, to make the fundamental shifts in their thinking to understand where today’s and our future value creation will come from; something that is mostly due to this increasing importance of the digital changes occurring all around us.
I have been reviewing my work on innovation fitness landscapes, in the designing and understanding of the dynamic capabilities organizations constantly need to find, evolve and establish for sustaining successful innovation. Those that are more essential to manage the growing complexity in moving towards achieving successful and sustaining innovation outcomes.
I felt it was time to make a restatement.
Let me restate what I am focusing upon here, in this work and why it has a separate, dedicated website to allow me to evolve and share in this discovery and thinking through journey.
So my hypothesis, hopefully covered off in this initial explanation is made on the basis of growing research and evidence, as an investigative point for further work-to-be-done in thinking and constructing around the plotting or mapping out specific innovation landscapes that deliver the innovation capabilities needed.
This work is now at a point it needs additional help to take this out further in a testing and experimental environment and I am looking for one or more ‘willing’ organizations to be the pilot for this to validate and further improve from the learning.
The Challenge I’m trying to Solve
Knowing what are the critical factors for innovation and their dependence for sustaining innovation success are becoming a vital necessity to understand so an organization can place the appropriate resources behind them. The question is, which are critical, which naturally occur when others begin to be put into place, which seem to have limited or no real effect on changing the dynamics of innovation?
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.
I clearly believe we do need to understand the strategic importance of the make-up of our innovation capital, yet presently nearly all our corporate boards lack any clear line of sight into this. Why?
Not understanding what makes up the capital is holding innovation back. We are actually constraining growth through this lack of understanding as it makes us all cautious of the future.
If we don’t fully understand the make-up of all our capital should we invest or divert resources to delivering on it? I think it is high time we did.
So what makes up our innovation capital and why is it important to know?
Should we care, does it matter? I would argue it does, increasingly so. Within the innovation capital lies the future of the organization and holds one of the real golden keys to the sustaining performance of the company, or not.