After a series of conversations around the Executive Innovation work mat, Jeffrey Phillips and I decided there was a need to add one more to the series, one that makes the business case for the work mat, one that is more from the leaders perspective.
In this video conversation of around 13 minutes, we explore why the leadership of organizations needs to get deeply involved in the innovation activity.
The reason top leadership needs to be fully involved
How many of our organizations are not looking to search for new ways for organic growth, improve their profit margins and create differentiation? This makes innovation central to this CORE need.
Leaders need to close the gap between aspiration and execution, and it is through building a robust, comprehensive innovation capability that gives them that chance to turn rhetoric into proof.
In many ways, their success requires innovation; it is wrapped up in their destiny. How often are they missing the strategic mark due to their inability to find that innovative pathway?
Leaders are constantly worrying over what is valued in the market, what products and services are essential to defend, those they need to promote and improve. This understanding does not come out of “thin air”. It comes out of having an organization that is market aware and innovative in responding.
One of the most critical aspects for a leadership team is to achieve a greater sense of identification and involvement from all within the organization. Innovation is one of those creative, forward-looking needs to build as central. Central needs to be sustaining and systematic, giving this ability to grow and ensure ongoing involvement and providing a consistency of purpose for all involved.
The work mat provides real value.
Firstly the work mat offers an open design that gives a framework for a comprehensive dialogue of what is central to the make-up of innovation.
Today we are in far more open organizations that need to connect and form new entities with others.
The rise of Ecosystems and platforms requires a more effective innovation mechanism, a more holistic, whole innovation system that can transform.
Handled well, the work mat gives focus, engagement and passion. It allows you to compare with others you want to form a deeper relationship with within any ecosystem design.
By pursuing innovation, you constantly have the opportunity to build a fresh dynamic “stock” for innovative ideas to feed off.
You draw out differences to either narrow the gaps between innovation approaches or find new ways to combine, to improve what each, as individual entities currently have.
You require a dialoguing framework to relate, build-out and constantly update and validate. The Executive Innovation work mat needs to be a living, dynamic framing tool to work around and through.
I believe there is a real utility of purpose in this open design.
For me, the work mat is more relevant today than when we, Jeffrey and I, worked it through together ten years ago. It addresses the core fundamentals and roots of innovation that are needed, today so much more to understand and bring together.
We need to build innovation capability broader and deeper, in competencies to innovate and find the capacities far more today than previously Why?
As I mentioned earlier, if growth is essential to achieve, then you need to constantly search and find new profit opportunities (profit pools) you need to design clear differentiation in product and services, then, innovation must be CORE to what you need to have running through the very fabric of your organization.
Ignoring innovation or designating it down the organization is abdicating the leadership role, it can limit your success and your tenure becomes shorter as you avoided risk, searching for holding on to what your have
If you are not seeking out a different, more disruptive or new business design, then you are eventually serving your shareholders poorly.
The leadership of an organization are the only one that has this mandate to decide the course to be taken, and then the market decides.
The CEO who takes the safe route to squeeze every bit of efficiency and productivity out of the very marrow of what gives vibrance and creativity to an organization is handing over a “reducing shell of an enterprise.” It is harder to revive or effectively compete in today’s highly competitive global world.
If you reduce your capacity to innovate you eventually have no sustainable future, without destructive forces needing to be applied, often when it is too late.
Innovation is fraught with risk, it is messy and unpredictable in discovery to design to execution, but it gives massive opportunity.
To help, you need to apply a living, evolving and dynamic framework to bring a commitment throughout the whole organisation to innovate.
We would argue, the Innovation Executive Work Mat gives alignment and creates a central tenant to a growing sense of pride, identification and belief, that the organization has a future understanding of purpose by its engagement in innovation.
Constant innovation compels movement, generates momentum through shared understanding and dynamism, in evolving the work mat constantly.
Making contact with us
Both Jeffrey and myself would be pleased to discuss the value of the Executive Innovation Work Mat with you at any time or stage you are at in your innovation journey.
The five dialogues on selected parts of the Innovation Work Mat
If you wish to view the five elements of the conversations we had recently, here are the links. These have covered
Convergence & Divergence– The opening outline of our discussion to the series seeking the need for alignment through the Executive Innovation Work Mat.
Strategy – we discuss the relationship between corporate design and innovation.
Governance – we examine how to govern an innovation project and why this work requires different governance models from other projects.
Function/Structure/Design – we examine how innovation should “work” – design and processes – and why it is vital to focus on an innovation capacity.
Common Language/Communication – we look at the importance of having common definitions, common language and regularly communicating about innovation.
We trust you find the time to listen or equally real each of the posts I have written to support these in the last few weeks. Just put into search “work mat dialogue.”
We feel the Executive Innovation Work Mat makes a compelling case to be deployed and widely used.
