amplifying the innovation signal - Innovation Thinking and Resources

We are not facing up to the big Societal challenges of today?

By @paul4innovating April 18, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Sustainability, Tackling innovation

Perhaps why innovation feels somewhat flat (well for me) is our organizations and societies are utterly failing to allow us all to step up in innovation to tackle those huge societal issues, those massive, growing problems that are swirling all around us.

We need to shake out of our lethargy and really begin to attempt to solve the real issues of our time. Some organizations are clearly working on and trying to draw attention and gain greater engagement but we need a much greater concerted effort to focus on the big societal challenges.

Global warming, rising health issues, finally cracking cancer, malaria, dementia, finding different solutions to the ageing within society. How are we going to tackle the rapidly depleting natural resources, the future conflicts over water, food, or energy . These are big, hairy, audacious gaps to be resolved.

Many are avoiding the need too stare hard into the future as we are not re-equipping everyone with skills that combine inventiveness, innovation and creativity that contributes into their communities, we have got stuck in the “me”. A reality of depletion is racing towards us and it is not a pretty sight.

So are we all all suffering innovation disillusionment?

By @paul4innovating April 15, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Foster Performance, gaining innovation momentum, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

You get this increasing sense that the ‘fizz’ has gone out of the innovation bubbly.

The innovation party presently feels a little flat.

The numerous delicious canapés to choose from are turning up at the edges as we are becoming disillusioned, just being fed on a present unexciting incremental innovation diet, lacking any real substance.

People are milling around with that bored look on their faces, some are also slumped down checking their watch or smartphones on when is the best time to cut out and find somewhere else to be, rather than be here. Has the fizz gone from innovation?

Are we being moved by innovation anymore?

Is innovation becoming a boring place to be seen for hanging out and being involved? Are we all feel that there is a less creative buzz going around?

Perhaps, it depends for each of us yet collectively you might agree we do feel something is definitely missing. The excitement has left the room, innovation has become too predictable.

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

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.

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.

Describing the future by using the business narrative

By @paul4innovating March 13, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Fresh thinking, Innovation strategy, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

In business, the future narrative is becoming vital. We all should care about the future and it becomes so important for us all to identify or not, as this gives us our identification.

I have found that narratives are becoming increasingly important to explain ‘things’. I’m re-learning this ‘art’ to tell a compelling story.

Our stories can combine much, communities can identify or reject, we can begin to explain complex stories by presenting a well-designed narrative that presents the arguments. It can explain the connections and outline the issues, both in terms of risk and opportunity.

I think business narratives will become essential for our organizations to use to explain where they are and what they see as their future.

A good business narrative should fill a real knowledge gap