@paul4innovating - Building Your Innovation Intelligence

Cultivating Absorptive Capacity

The flow of knowledge as our alternative currents

We need to cultivate Absorptive behaviour and allow it to flow.

We need a system to capture and allow knowledge to flow. For me the adoption model seems to be one worth investigating. If we want to achieve the goal of distributed innovation we need to have in place this possible framework around absorptive capacity to encourage different learning behaviours.. Nesta (www.nesta.org.uk) produced a useful report some time back called “Innovation by Adoption” and I feel this has a good framework that support distributed innovation.

The report argues in a place with a strong absorptive capacity three main outputs subsequently result from the flow of external or distributed knowledge: (1) the creation of new innovation; (2) the creation of new knowledge; and (3) that it does lead to new economic and social value.

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How do you see your innovation journey?

Two people could be standing up on the mountain, looking out across the same landscape but see the journey in different ways.

The question is how do you see the journey to achieve innovation fitness through two different ‘cloud’ maps

Expected outcomes of Landscaping 1 — Your journey to innovation fitness-view one

Or do you see this journey totally differently, not what it needs to cover but the route and challenges it will need to work out?

Expected outcomes of Landscaping 2 — The alternative possible view of your innovation fitness journey

Irrespective the terrain can look rugged and challenging. Are you ready to begin your journey?

The Moving Space Required for Innovation

The moving space for innovation is to allow everyone to participate in being involved and wanting to get ‘fit.’ To do this you have to be opened up to a number of “possible paths” to allow it to flow and take hold. There is the need to explore multiple ways to learn and find the right pathway. This needs a dynamic social fabric to allow it to flow, it needs organizational engagement through active experimentation.

Previously I had discussed the difficulty of setting rules for innovation. What is required is a looser approach to mutual adaption and mutual adjustment. This arises from working through the same rules and resources to access, integrate, expand and recombine knowledge as part of everyday daily jobs. The understanding of absorptive capacity helps

Possible a starting point is through three simple rules and resources I came across but can’t find the reference to at present, regretfully but these are powerful in their intent and engagement:

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Mapping out a rugged innovation terrain

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.

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Finding time for dynamics within the capacity to innovate

Do we know what the dependencies and complementaries for building and sustaining innovation success are? How do you sustain innovation, is it more through the structuring of everyday work, by creating a particular set of social rules and resources that foster specific routines? Really, that does seem to me as sounding a little too easy, or we all would have got to this point but we haven’t,when it comes to managing innovation. Innovation seems to conflict with everyday work.

The reality is we can’t ‘create’ rules or specific routines when it comes to our need to constantly innovate, there is a host of constantly changing variables, risks and conflicts that need constant adaptation to those specific circumstances, yet we can learn more on the underlying principles and approaches. So how do we manage this in everyday work, inside organizations hell bent on managing efficiently. Certainly I buy the argument that Innovation should become part of everyone’s job on a daily basis so they have the space and potential to work on it constantly but what does this require? This is part of our journey within seeking innovation fitness through its dynamics.

Here we begin….

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The Really Pressing Need of Innovation

Let me firstly outline the REAL challenge I see with innovation.

Knowing what are the critical factors and their dependences for sustaining innovation success is vital to understand so that an organization can place the appropriate resources behind them. The questions are: 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? Knowing these answers and having these clearer to achieve a higher ‘return on impact/investment’ (ROII) has a real business value.

Today, we lack a clear system model that brings the critical innovation factors out and gives them their appropriate values of importance so resources can be allocated accordingly. Also if this can further be extended to provide the ability to model different future states and conceived future scenarios through different impact-investment simulations, this would certainly provide a strong relational tool, for assessing business and innovation allocation, with the appropriate resources. to achieve a greater ‘fitness and impact’ in innovation to focus upon within their capability build.

Approaching innovation in the this more dynamic, fitness orientated way we are suggesting on this site, does lead to greater understanding, a cohesion and a clear direction and purpose. The end result is raising your organizations fitness to innovate to do the jobs the strategic goals call for. You align innovation to these strategic goals. Your fitness to innovate is designed to produce the results wanted.

Achieving Business Relevance

The real need is for improving the business relevance of anything that is new.

To quantify this, in general this should include to enhance, reduce, eliminate or improve:

Increasing flexibility and efficiency.
Managing knowledge effectively through the adaptive capacity framework.
Increasing productivity and reducing time to market.
Facilitating teamwork.
Enabling on-line gathering of marketing information and strengthening customer dialogues.
Improving relationships with suppliers, partners and those within your extended network.
Integrating differing sources of customer information though social media designs.
Making client relationships more effective and engaged in two way flows.
Eliminating redundant processes and legacy systems on a consistent manner.
Reducing costs by implementing IT-based solutions that integrate and are highly visable.
Reducing bureaucratic tasks (those that did not add value).
Using e-learning to improve capabiities, investing the necessary discovery time.
Exploring through participating on platforms, external relationships to gain alternative opinions to challenge your own.
Increasing the market range of goods and services in consistent ways that deliever value to the customer to achieve the job they are wanting to be resolved.
Improving relationships with employees by deepening the trust, openness and recognizing the value contribution they are making.

Any selection must consistently focus upon what is going to increase the competitiveness and uniqueness and improve the value and investments made for higher returns.

Outcomes from Innovation Impact

What outcomes can you expect to create particular advantages for a firm that is trying to compete in today’s economy:

Strengthen the innovation knowledge management within a firm.
Foster creativity as a key ingredient in the innovation process.
Increase ability of the business to react quickly to change, without a big impact on efficiency.
Promote human resource management as a strategic area within the business.
Improve the gathering of updated and valuable market information.
Promote co-operation and teamwork, build diverse capability and competency.
Foster networking and the construction of external support systems.
Take advantage of the internet and other social media communications technologies.
Emphasize a global-oriented approach (internationalization), highly outwardly looking.
Accelerate and shorten the time-to-market in innovation projects as a constant need.
Encourage entrepreneurial initiatives and its spirit.
Integrate science, technology and market understanding in fluent adaptive systems.
Increase efficiency using more advanced information technologies that give improved knowledge.

Working through some of the theory

Let’s mix the theory of fitness landscapes with your innovation objectives

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. 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. The more ‘rugged’ the landscape, the tougher the innovation challenge, can also determine the greater fitness for the rate of innovation. The height of the peaks in these landscapes, the greater value placed upon them, illustrates how intense the innovation challenge is, and the number of critical peaks shows how diverse its potentially is to provide the appropriate resources.

The ability to identifying the emerging patterns provides the need to act and invest, making adaptive even exploratory walks to provide the appropriate resources needed 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. You need to experiment, to take these exploratory ‘walk’s to realize the potential and learn how to scale accordingly.

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the Pathway Curve Methodology

By taking a more systematic approach to any innovation you achieve a greater understanding over time of what is involved.

Firstly you have to ask what you are trying to achieve, is it incremental innovation, distinctive, disruptive or even radical white space innovation? Do you approach innovation differently for each of these? I would argue you need to learn and build from one to another as you learn on the way, this is my going up a curve that increases in complexity and its scope/ outcome.

How do we embed innovation in all its forms needs what I feel is a unique approach that I have called the Pathway Curve Methodology

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