We are recognizing increasingly that both individuals and organizations needs to explore multiple ways to learn and find the right pathway for innovation learning as they progress. This needs a more ‘dynamic social fabric’ to allow it to flow, it needs organizational encouragement. It needs mutual adaptions and mutual adjustment. The understanding of absorptive capacity framework I’ve previously outlined significantly helps structure this.
Three simple rules have great intent.
Possible a starting point is through three simple rules I came across, but presently I can’t find the reference source on this regretfully. These seem to me to have a powerful intent:
- Mapping organizational and project innovation processes in the context of a shared responsibility for innovation relies on the rule of taking full responsibility that allows all “to see” the space of innovation that exists.
- Generalizing organizational and project knowledge in the context where knowledge is a central task relies on the rule of supporting routines for getting to that space and for keeping it open for all to share and explore:.
- -This helps people be collectively conscious of what they know and how they know it, build up and having expertise in are all dynamic routine activities to become competent experts or are clear on where to go to find out where it resides.
- – It also fosters respect for knowing and leaning from what others know and contributes to a growing improved skill set far more geared towards understanding higher-level conceptual frameworks
- Spiraling across cycles of adaptation in a context of constantly looking for new opportunities relies on the rule for constantly searching for new opportunities that creates an organization in which people are used to innovation that becomes a second nature– “the chaos is that we are constantly innovating”. Also the rule provides people with vital resource of having ways to deal with inevitable surprises of innovation.
We need to find ways to combined general knowledge for wide awareness of available options, and specialized knowledge for assessing the systemic impact of specific options. We need to move towards the development of “T-Shaped skills” being available constantly, to apply to different problems. Choice can stay fluid and it gradually ‘firms up’ to allow greater exploration and evaluation, as we ‘master’ knowledge and progressively experiment.
The ability to innovate is in the people, it is not in a procedures. Our pressing need is to structure innovation activity into everyday work, to make it dynamic in capability and become the new routine work. I feel these three simple rules just seem to make such good sense as a starting point for making innovation part of every persons working day. Do you?