Advancing innovation - Innovation Thinking and Resources

Gaining idea engagement can be a five step process.

By @paul4innovating April 9, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Foster Performance, Fresh thinking, innovation execution delivery, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Polymers, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

I have been recently revisiting Everett Roger’s work on diffusion and adoptions recently for providing us with a better place for engagement in innovation approaches.

I’ve been evaluating if it has the same relevance in my mind in our more connected world, where speed, knowledge and exchanges are measured in microseconds.

This reminded me of a suggestion I made some time back and I thought I’d ‘air’ this again for engaging with others.

We constantly fall into the trap of not providing our listeners enough of a reason to ‘buy into’ our thoughts. We forget to either pitch it to their mental framework or we do not provide a set of compelling arguments that allows our idea a mutual recognition of its value or structure, to take it forward and transform it into something tangible and valuable.

I think using Rogers’s rate of diffusion principles you can end up offering a fairly powerful positioning statement.

Learning favours the brave who respond faster

By @paul4innovating April 6, 2014Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Foster Performance, gaining innovation momentum, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

The challenges we are facing today seem to be coming faster at us, more complex to decipher and then re-evaluate how we should respond.

To achieve a faster response we certainly need to educate the organization more than ever.
We need to absorb more, we need to encourage learning more especially to pursue innovation.

We need to actively set up learning ways within our organizations to establish their abilities to recognize the value of new, external information (knowledge), assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends.

Innovation within the organization needs not just greater recognition of its vital parts, but also of its status as a value-enhancing and organizational life-changing event that we need to move towards increasingly in more organized ways.

Innovation needs to be recognized as a clear discipline, new expertise that is as powerful as Marketing became some decades ago.

Organizations are in a constant dilemma of the innovation fit.

By @paul4innovating March 28, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, gaining innovation momentum, innovation execution delivery, Innovation strategy, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

The issue of “where does innovation fit?” is one of the most difficult ones to address in many organizations. It seems to fit uncomfortably for many.

At the top of our organizations they ‘require’ innovation but will often not want the potential disruption this might entail.

Yet the organization today is being challenged like never before, it has gone from managing the predictable business to responding to the unpredictable, more opportunistic and alert to change, a place innovation can fit within the need to respond to this different environment.

This is the final post in the series that has focused on the innovation work mat components

Are you evolving the innovation function and design

By @paul4innovating March 26, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, gaining innovation momentum, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

source: prophet.com — image credit www.prophet.com

Organizations are struggling to forge a new path in innovation function and design that captures opportunities fast and also exploits the increasing need of being adaptive and flexible.

Organizations are looking at structures for their innovation activity that are taking a more agile and focused approach, wanting to push for constantly accelerating the process. New practices are emerging.

This is demanding more radical redesigns of the function, processes and structures around innovation. Innovators are being more challenged.

Against this need for new, more radical designs there still lies that underlying concern, often at the top of our organizations, on how to manage innovation risk without significant organisational disruption.

There is this lingering fear that pushing for more radical innovation can create significant upheaval within the organization. Innovation is being challenged by the view of “we want predictable innovation but radical enough to make sure we grow.”

Innovation has to manage within this conflicting message. It is through the well-designed system, processes and function that this can happen but this needs redesigning fairly radically to adjust to today’s world of wanting innovation faster than ever.

Successful Innovation needs a common language, context and communicating

By @paul4innovating March 23, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, gaining innovation momentum, innovation execution delivery, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

The story of Babel — The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563)

People disconnect because they lack what is needed to connect! Innovation thrives from the knowledge and you need to make sure this is allowed to flow.

To achieve those essential knowledge connections, you need a shared understanding of innovation, that common sense of purpose as a framework. This will though, always stay a work-in-progress.

You need to begin to build a common language of greater understanding. We need to unite around innovation. Imagine if you work consciously to put knowledge in the hands of people willing to make innovation happen, what the potential might be?

Give people the power of the context for their innovation engagement and that shifts everything to give them a clearer shape and meaning. You are laying out the conditions, criteria and circumstances, giving innovation its foundations.

Measuring and motivating the innovation elephant

By @paul4innovating March 21, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Antibodies, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Innovation strategy, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

I often think of the parable of “The Elephant and the Blind Men” when I get into discussions about measuring innovation.

What are truths, what are the fallacies? The parable implies that one’s often subjective experience can be true on your need, but not necessarily the other person’s view of their understanding of value.

You get, as the end result, a failure to account for other ‘beliefs’ or capture the real value and miss providing broader motivations to encourage the innovation elephant along.

Establishing the right metrics that motivate and yield the result you are looking for is sometimes a tough challenge. You should always start with the bigger picture, organizational needs and then design the metrics and cascade these throughout the organization.

Recognizing the conditions for changing innovation in culture and climate

By @paul4innovating March 20, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Tackling the culture and climate that is needed to create a thriving innovation environment is complex.

In this post I can only touch on certain points to trigger that deeper examination and offer the stimulus and considerations it needs.

Within the Executive Innovation Work Mat we have seven domains or components that need bringing together to form a new integrated knot.

The aim of the work mat is to draw the senior executive into the innovation process and to support them as they think through what is required to build a more sustaining and integrated innovation understanding within the organization. Their role is a strategic one that sets the conditions and overview on innovation.

The environment for innovation does really matter

By @paul4innovating March 18, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, innovation execution delivery, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

The Executive Innovation Work Mat methodology requires investigation and engagement across the seven domains or components that make up the work mat. The aim of any work mat discussions undertaken with executives focuses upon bringing out the parts necessary for innovation to happen and that needs an integrated approach and lasting engagement from senior management.

In a series of articles I will be looking at each of the seven components within the work mat to raise questions to probe and prompt the necessary thinking that needs to be made in organizations determined to build a lasting innovation competence and structure.

I’ve already offered some opening thoughts on Governance and Innovation, for me one of the basic building blocks for innovation lies in creating the right conditions for an Environment to innovate.

So what are those environmental conditions required for innovation?

Correcting an innovation oversight sometimes hits you hard!

By @paul4innovating March 16, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, innovation execution delivery, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

I’ve had one of those weeks where a certain realization took hold, something that had been nagging away at you suddenly surfaces and slaps you in the face. Ouch!

I have just completed my own gap analysis on how I have explained the Executive Innovation Work Mat methodology and its value. It actually was a bit of an eye-opener. I was surprised in this audit of all associated posts, articles and papers written by myself or in collaboration with Jeffrey Phillips, that there were some very glaring gaps in my posts on explaining this methodology.

The Seven Components that make up the Executive Innovation Work Mat

The Innovation Work Mat has seven components or domains

What was crazy here is the fact I have the research, the component parts all worked through, structured and being used in actual engagements to prompt the essential discussions, yet I had not been publishing these enough through my posts to underpin the methodology.

I had been missing essential domain component messages that are the very essence of why you need to work around the entire work mat as essential. I was missing the opportunity to publically talk about ALL the parts as it is the combining of these that does provide its value as an integrated approach to innovation that can cascade throughout the organization.

The Role of Governance needed in Innovation

By @paul4innovating March 14, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, innovation execution delivery, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Later this month a book I have looked forward too, is finally being launched.

It is called “Innovation Governance: How Top Management Organizes and Mobilizes for Innovation” written by Jean-Philippe Deschamps & Beebe Nelson. Jean-Philippe Deschamps is emeritus Professor of Technology and Innovation Management at IMD in Lausanne (Switzerland).

Innovation Governance is promising to provide a comprehensive framework to help top management develop the overarching values, policies and initiatives needed for a corporate innovation constitution.

The authors are providing a framework for encouraging and focusing innovation by explaining what innovation governance is, the various models for governance and their advantages and disadvantages, how to assess and improve governance practices, and behavioural tactics for maximizing the effectiveness of governance.