Recognizing the different capabilities to develop and grow

June 26, 2018Posted inCapabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Fitness Landscaping Regimes, Impact & Scale

IFD Complexity WebA 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 competencies that determine a firm’s ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure both the resources and competencies 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.

The Value in Personal Innovation Learning Journeys

June 25, 2018Posted inFoster Performance, Integrated Innovation Thinking

If you don’t have time, how can you learn? We are in need increasingly, of faster understanding, to quickly learn or resolve an immediate need, or we have this determination or essential requirement within our innovation role to deepen our knowledge and understanding of innovation. These are usually split into two parts, called are “micro or macro learning opportunities”.

The value of having an innovation guide, mentor or coach helps you accelerate through both these needs and learning opportunities. I see four points of value, my value proposition, if you like, for you to achieve personal innovation growth:

Fitting understanding into the innovation puzzle

June 22, 2018Posted inAdvancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Foster Performance, Integrated Innovation Thinking

Formalizing a new Innovation learning-as-a-service is complicated, far more than I originally thought. Still, a certain course has been set and it is now working through much of its structure, learning much myself on the way to fit this within the innovation puzzle we all have.

When I was thinking through this concept I fell back onto one of my most valuable techniques to work through, clustering a set of questions and capturing all the different thinking through the use of Mind Mapping techniques. Such a valuable tool.

A selection of maps that included: what a curator can do in innovation, of painting a picture of a strong advocacy practice, of working through a guiding approach, the need to reflect on the whole facilitation process, etc., and each brainstorm takes a time to work through, build and formalize. The end result becomes a much richer landscape of what I can offer and what equally might be needed.

Defining Innovation Capital

June 21, 2018Posted inCapabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Outcomes & Expectancies

My definition of what makes up innovation capital:

New Core of 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 marketplace 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 focuses more upon the dynamics within innovation, that provide the true value creation in successful outcomes in the 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 possess 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.

Learning Platforms and Personal Learning Pathways

June 20, 2018Posted inFoster Performance, Integrated Innovation Thinking

My mind has been swirling around the significant changes taking place around learning. Not just in the time we have available, suggested recently as 25 minutes per week to stop and learn but in the variety of ways we can learn. Clearly, many of these are digital to construct, so as to apply the more modern design process that works for each of us individually, at our time of need.

I have been struck by the emphasis on personal learning and development. We still get very caught up in the need for scale yet it is the ability and flexibility to design these to our individual pathway that becomes “the order of the day”. The constant struggle is for each of us in simply stopping to focus, finding the time and the last thing you can afford to do, is take an ad-hoc approach to this, it needs a structured design.

This is where external facilitation might help

The world is working within increased complexity, are you?

June 19, 2018Posted inCapabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Natural & Unnatural tensions, The Big Challenges

The challenges of managing in today’s worlds are tough, very tough and demanding. It is so volatile, potentially disruptive and full of risk. Organizations are simply struggling to shed their clothes in the 20th century and find a way to smoothly manage to become more adaptable and agile in form. They are adjusting to offer consistent responses to instability in the most effective ways, to keep adapting to the consistent market challenges, and in so doing profiting from meeting that latest challenge or disruptive opportunity.

The problem is you simply can’t manage this smoothly, it will be highly disruptive as the organization re-equips themselves and learns, often in the hardest way possible, through failure, through experimentation, through risk-taking. Innovation is increasingly seen as the pathway forward in capturing growth and grabbing any advantage, even if these are increasingly transient. Yet as we look towards building our innovation capabilities we need to work in totally different ways and see ‘things’ in new ways.

Innovation in itself is also a force of instability and we need to find ways to embrace much of its uncertainties by understanding its dynamics. We need to have a major shift in our organizational thinking, needed to find the appropriate new balance within those dual ‘tensions’ of ‘stability’ through efficiency, with its opposite, ‘change’ driven by innovation. It is these dynamic forces within the world we work that need us to respond by building that capacity for managing those ‘dynamic’ innovation capabilities, that today’s markets are requiring and organizations are needing to master.

Mentoring versus Coaching for Innovation

June 15, 2018Posted inFoster Performance

I bet a lot of people get caught out in not knowing the differences between Mentoring and Coaching. Equally, when you are in the coaching mode you need to guard against moving over to the mentoring mode unless it is conscious ways. Understand the differences becomes important.

Why do we need to mentor or coach today? We are facing highly competitive environment changes. The key to the need of having facilitation is to bring fresher, more innovative and leading-edge solutions into any innovation thinking but it is often all about the blending of experiences and the relationship dynamics of those involved in this set of dialogues.

“For fresh vision and momentum, I need your past like you need mine”

The objectives are to deliver innovation understanding in both mentoring and coaching approaches 

Understanding Your Innovation Capital- Well Do You?

June 14, 2018Posted inCapabilities and Capacities

A new core Innovation CapitalIf 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.

Time starved, innovation lacking

June 13, 2018Posted inImprove Collaboration & Communication, Integrated Innovation Thinking

Today most executives seem to be time starved. They are constantly reacting to daily events, for fix focusing and fixing short-term performance. This applies to the top executive down to the most junior.

This time-starved environment has real implications for innovation.

If we don’t sit down and think through issues and implication of our present performance around innovation, how can we close the gaps and improve it? We just simply don’t seem to have a more systematic, connected road map within our thinking that points the way to the improving longer-term as we keep doing this ‘reacting’ only.

We have such a limited amount of time; to pause, to evaluate, or redesign. We equally don’t feel capable to simply assign this over, even to outsiders to help. We are far too challenged and driven, often far too inbreed into thinking that “our solutions can only be the only solutions to our problems or challenges”.