@paul4innovating - Innovation Thinking and Resources

Building bridges between stocks and flows

By @paul4innovating February 4, 2015Exploratory Walks & Needs, Impact & Scale, Outcomes & Expectancies, Pathway dependence curves5 Comments

I really enjoyed this thinking about stocks and flows that are necessary.

Let me share the part that works really well for me. This relates to approaching social media but it equally applies to building innovation capital, it is recognizing and then building the stock and the flows around innovation.

Robin Sloan does a brilliant job of explaining this:

“One of the biggest takeaways was the concept of stock and flow. Do you know about this? Couldn’t be simpler, and really, it’s not even that much of an a-ha.

There are two kinds of quantities in the world. Stock is a static value: money in the bank, or trees in the forest. Flow is a rate of change: fifteen dollars an hour, or three thousand toothpicks a day. Easy – too easy.

9 Stages for building innovation fitness

By @paul4innovating February 3, 2015Dynamic capabilities, Fitness Landscaping Regimes, Outcomes & Expectancies6 Comments

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

Do you know where your distinct innovation capabilities come from?

By @paul4innovating February 3, 2015Capabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Mapping & Rugged Terrains, Outcomes & Expectancies2 Comments

The dynamics that make up innovation capabilities

Just begin to work through these ‘thoughts’ to begin to evaluate the value of knowing your innovation fitness so as to find out what makes up your distinct dynamic capabilities:

By firstly mapping out your innovation capabilities to the task at hand enables you to understand and relate to what is needed – we call that the context for innovation.

Innovation Fitness Landscapes helps in this task by identifying the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts‐ and apply the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain or challenges you are facing.

The greater understanding of the ‘fitness points needed’ can transform your innovation landscape potential, or in business parlance, achieve your goal.

Achieving this fitness accelerates your opportunities into final tangible outcomes. Here is a little bit of the theory: you look for those critical factors that will give higher value potential or ‘peaks’ that are more valuable to your needs.

Defining Innovation Capital

By @paul4innovating February 3, 2015Capabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Outcomes & Expectancies3 Comments

My definition of what makes up innovation capital:

“Innovation capital is the sum of all that promotes the development and changes required for achieving innovation outcomes, within one organization or its broader networked environment, for market place advantage”

“These are made up of the resources, processes, knowledge and capabilities, that are constantly evolving and highly dynamic to build greater innovating capacity.”

“These build upon the capabilities of ‘sensing, seizing and transforming’ to build new capital that focus more upon the dynamics within innovation, that provide the true value creation in successful outcomes in final product, services or executing within business models”

We need to value both “stocks and flows” in equal attention to build innovation capital

The ‘stock’ of innovation capital can render different productive value outcomes, is a bundle of the firm’s resources/assets and holds the renewal capabilities and they possesses attributes that make it a “strategic asset”

Innovation capital is made up of many different assets that are often context specific and interconnected and this makes it hard to build without taking a broader, more holistic approach to developing your capabilities, capacities and competencies to innovate. You ‘map’ and align these to fit your strategic goals and aspirations.

Understanding that innovation capital becomes your new core

By @paul4innovating January 30, 2015Absorptive Capacity, Capabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Outcomes & Expectancies

Much of my focus within my work is to move organizations towards recognizing and expanding their innovation capital or stock.

The hard part for many organizations is that many of the key elements of innovation capital consist of many intangibles as well as tangibles and this needs deeper understanding and appreciation. These intangibles are in most cases non-technological and embodied in the organizational routines and thinking of the employees.

It is focusing on building the stock of this innovation capital as well as making the flow more dynamic, ever evolving, adapting and changing to the different conditions being presented to the company.

Some of the critical elements that need to be considered can be described as follows:

Recognizing the different capabilities to develop and grow

By @paul4innovating August 24, 2014Capabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Fitness Landscaping Regimes, Impact & Scale

A firm’s ordinary capabilities are the ones that enable us to perform efficiently and effectively, those essential routines and practices that often require having a high level of technical need supporting these activities.

In contrast, dynamic capabilities are those higher level competences that determine a firm’s ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure both the resources and competences to possibly shape, have the power to transform and then be deployed to meet rapidly changing business environments to take advantage of these changing conditions.

Recognizing the importance of Dynamic Capabilities

Dynamic capabilities are about selecting the right things to do and getting them done, while ordinary capabilities are about doing things right. The former implicates dynamic efficiency, the latter static efficiency.

Combining four foundation pillars.

By @paul4innovating July 24, 2014Capabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Exploratory Walks & Needs, System Solution models, The Big Challenges

We need to think about recognizing the ‘combining effects’ of four foundation pillars; of value creation (vc), business models (bm), intellectual capital assets (ica) and innovation capital (ic). It is the dynamics within the multiple combinations that will generate the future wealth creation we need.

We are in need of having a better understanding of the integrated value focal points of these four pillars combining, they need connecting so we can build the supporting structures and place the roof of need, our wealth creating one, to give us a new potential of harnessing our innate abilities to be creative. These four pillars offer perhaps a new core, a new transforming power, they make our activities connected and dynamic.

Struggling with counting ALL the sums of our capital

By @paul4innovating July 24, 2014Absorptive Capacity, Capabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Fitness Landscaping Regimes, Outcomes & Expectancies, The Big Challenges

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.

Are we really measuring what matters?

By @paul4innovating July 24, 2014Capabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities

Today, it is the non-financial performance, made up of mostly the intangibles within organizations, that is accounting for upwards of 80% of present investors’ valuation of our organizations.

Yet do shareholders really have the knowledge to judge the real source of value creation inside our organizations? I think not but they should. Does Management actually?

We lack a real line of sight into the true value of our organizations that make them dynamic

Putting some dynamic tension into the system

By @paul4innovating July 7, 2014Absorptive Capacity, Capabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Natural & Unnatural tensions

There is a growing need for having some dynamic tensions within the organization’s system; these helps generate the better conditions for innovation to thrive. We are learning more on the better tools, techniques and approaches available for putting the learning tensions into our work, making them more dynamic, linked and increasingly relevant to the work to be done.

1). A common language is essential

Any dynamics in the system needs that ability to talk the same language, something that becomes common and embedded to support the routines and move quicker to the concepts and solutions, as others can ‘understand’ them as well. It is through working on the inner stories and appreciating the history, it is having an appreciation of events, good and bad, it is through local slogans, your jargon and dialogues that bring people together. The power of storytelling helps gain adoption and identification to those needs for working on a common cause.