Author: @paul4innovating

The approach we take to embedding innovation in all its forms is a unique one that we have called the Innovation Pathway Curve:

We take you through FIVE of these curves in learning and exploring:

• Overcoming the different stages within the obstacle curves
• Building the necessary capability and capacity curves
• Developing the growth building steps within the curves
• Exploring the organizational impact understanding
• Delivering the discovery & transformation needed.

Our methodology takes you through a structured approach, a way of climbing up this innovation understanding curve so the different needs you are trying to achieve (incremental, distinctive, radical, & disruptive)  can be managed in a clear ways, to support any initiative.

Innovation needs to be worked at, so as to continue to grow a deeper understanding of its ‘make-up’ over time. You gain from this pathway approach a deeper understanding of all the aspects of innovation needed as well as our approach supports experimenting in controlled environments to take these fully on board, embedded and practised as part of the curve methodology.

At Agility we can help you to understand and be effective on your own innovation curve understanding in the ‘fits’ needed and why the different components do need to come together to deliver the value required from innovation today.

To find out more please contact us directly to discuss how this can be effectively put to use in your organization to grow your innovation curve understanding dramatically

Leadership Alignment Work Mat for Innovation to be fully connected.

The Leadership Alignment Workmat provides a unique examination of the executive’s role in innovation.

This offers a framework that the leadership of the organization can adopt to ensure linkages and synergies between strategy and innovation, innovation and capabilities, innovation and culture.

Often they lack the communicating medium to help clarify and shape the innovation story to tell, so as to provide the guidance necessary for achieving that essential engagement and encouragement they would like, to align organizational efforts required from innovation to the strategies envisioned.

Benefits of applying the Leadership Alignment Work Mat

From an investment in an executive work mat exercise you receive four significant benefits.

First, as an executive team you will create cohesion and a consistent innovation framework that reduces barriers or uncertainties for innovators.

Second, you demonstrate your engagement, which increases visibility and lowers risk, which encourages more and better ideas.

Third, you create work-flows and encourage innovation skills and capabilities which accelerate ideas through your internal processes that increase the opportunity to be more self-organized under this framework.

Fourth, you influence compensation, provide motivations and promote the cultural and climate to innovate which progressively reduces barriers and creates incentives for innovation to thrive.

These benefits add up to more speed, more agility, clearer flexibility resulting in new, relevant products and services that can increase organic growth and provide solutions that differentiate you.

We believe C.E.O’s and senior executives play a vital role in the success or failure of innovation. Unfortunately, those roles have often not been well-defined and sometimes they are rarely well executed. We call this the engagement- alignment gap. Only an engaged, committed senior executive can create the means for building a sustained innovation capability or disciplined approach through defining innovation’s role.

The Leadership Alignment Work Mat resolves the litmus test.

It provides a compelling structured approach for senior executives to build, extend and sustain an innovation capability. Starting with the most strategic goals of your business, it links and aligns innovation to strategy; it explores the critical aspects of any senior innovation strategic framework. It addresses the critical aspects so as to provide a holistic approach to innovation, reducing uncertainty, reducing risk and increasing your chance to help your company innovate consistently.

The end outcome of this Leadership Alignment Work Mat approach provides the innovation leadership and guidance to your organization to ‘frame’ the innovation activity to your strategic goals. This allows you to articulate and communicate the alignment through the innovation work mat throughout the organization. It will provide the necessary understanding needed to perform the innovation tasks more effectively under this framework umbrella.

It offers the strategic ‘frame’ your innovation future requires, it forms the emerging common language and communication necessary across the organization, that provides guidance, inspiration and clarity to your innovation vision and goals.It allows innovation to ‘cascade’ throughout the organization to achieve that close alignment innovation requires with the strategy to achieve a meaningful and sustaining set of results.

To find out more or request a detailed White Paper on this, please contact  paul@agilityinnovation.com

Sustaining an innovation competitive advantage- a unique formula

Sustaining innovation is made up of critical components that bring intensity and return to your investment and provide you the framework to build a sustaining advantage on innovation others will find hard to imitate.

So what is this framework? SCA = II + EE + MLC + OC + RNE- its power comes from innovation intensity.

Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA) comes from the combining effects of the following:

II = Innovation Intensity – its degree of adoption, investments made, its multiple level of activities and the focus of the intensity given to building capabilities

EE = Entrepreneurial Energies – how you set about and promote and generate the internal environment to enable innovation to take hold and be seen as a learning environment people want to get involved with

MLC = Market Learning Competence – these give a clearer awareness on what and where to acquire from and learn from. The key need is to orientate always towards, and generally get to the heart of, where innovation takes place- in the market place and with your customers

OC = Organizational Capacity – knowing the differences in learning, linking the different intellectual capitals and combining the complementary assets needed to make them more dynamic

RNE =  Relationship & Networking Effects – the supporting and enhancing aspects of making greater connections, collaborations and exchanges so as to speed up the process of innovation, reduce costs and enhance understanding getting closer to knowing where latent knowledge lies to assist and share for greater impact and result.

What is the result of adopting the SCA framework?

ROI = Investment x Activity x Change (learning environment)

                                Results Impact

Making Sustainability central to innovation capability building

Today’s challenge is to build the capacity to be different, to sustain the critical aspect that innovation can provide: the stimulus for sustaining lasting growth. It is through continued learning, capabilities become stronger and more difficult for competitors to understand and imitate. Capabilities grow through use and application.

You aim to provide two types of capabilities, distinctive, which are the characteristics of the organization which cannot be replicated by others and reproductive, which can be bought by the competition but need to be appropriate to your objectives. It is through value creation you achieve greater sustainability and the five elements within this model can provide the path to this.

We offer a unique solution that intensifies innovation so it becomes the power for sustaining and driving your present and future growth.

Come talk to us over what ‘sits’ behind this framework to then apply it within your organization.

 Everything we want to do is 100% focused on innovating!

 Bringing agility, flexibility, adaptability and learning into the innovation equation

We provide the pathways to your future innovation growth through four critical focal points of any necessary value creation:

1) working through alternative thinking and exploration, mostly using the three horizons framing, to structure your future innovation activity.

2) developing and deepening your innovation capital, making it more dynamic and responsive, higher in learning values and knowledge discovery & transformation.

3) aligning your innovation activities to your strategic intent, integrating the critical components into a clear roadmap and design, building collective agility for innovation success

4) renewing your innovation practices, processes & designs through evaluations, establishing innovation as a true core, building on future design and needs, not legacy thinking and past, often-outdated practices.

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All of our frameworks, methodologies, tools & techniques, including our thought leadership are designed for organizations, the leadership,  teams or individuals tasked with generating and leading the innovation activity.

Our primary role is to support and extend innovation, in thinking and developing the capabilities and capacities, to match the client’s ambition and goals, by providing a real depth of innovation insight and advice.