amplifying the innovation signal - Innovation Thinking and Resources

Sinking the unthinkable

By @paul4innovating December 3, 2015Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Antibodies, Building Innovation Capability, Foster Performance, Fresh thinking, innovation execution delivery, Uncategorized1 Comment

Innovation and the Titanic The days of simply having ideas moving through a pipeline and coming out the other end as finished product and services seems part of our great past.

I believe Innovation is becoming overwhelmed by all the changes we are applying into innovation activity and its management.

I would say the IM system is under even greater strain from the shifts coming from the multiple applications of technology, new approaches to design and modelling as well as all the necessary engagement and touchpoints.

Yet we are still expecting this deluge of change occurring to happily move our innovations through that past established, often manual processes, we have presently in place. I think not. We are deluding ourselves, that all is well.
There are such changes occurring.

Constructing Innovation as Value Management

By @paul4innovating November 26, 2015Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, innovation execution delivery, Leading innovation, Polymers, Shifting dynamics in innovation1 Comment

Innovation needs to create value, both short-term and progressively over time. It fuels the growth and fires the imagination.
Yet our innovation activities are constantly coming up short for the leaders within our organizations, who continue to remain disappointed in its final outcome to stimulate and drive the growth they want to see.
It is actually the classic “chicken and egg”. Aristotle (384–322 BC) was puzzled by the idea that there could be a first bird or egg and concluded that both the bird and egg must have always existed. Leaders need to lead and are they the chicken, they are the resource for how can the people charged with innovation can lay the ‘golden eggs’ needed, if they are incapable of laying? Or should the innovation egg come first for our leaders to become more confident and build further, believing in innovation far more?
There should be no dilemma we can’t treat innovation lightly anymore, it needs to develop its uniqueness for each of our organizations to evolve. We need both the egg and the chicken to be ‘producing’.
What I’m driving towards here is that innovation is evolving is my 1st point

The Challenges Being Faced by Innovation Consultants

By @paul4innovating November 22, 2015Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Foster Performance, Improve Collaboration & Communication, innovation execution delivery, Shifting dynamics in innovation1 Comment

From my perspective, I’ve been looking at a real challenge today, that many consultants offering innovation services are not providing real sustaining consulting value to clients, only ad-hoc services.

Unless this changes it will continue to erode the clients’ confidence in these service providers and they will be seeking increasing internal solutions to tackle their problems. I think if this trend continues it will be a mistaken course.

Consultants are not addressing many of the changes occurring and ignoring opportunities to adapt to different circumstances, they are simply not putting up a strong case of their engagement by redesigning their business models or opening themselves up to different forms of collaboration.

In many ways, the consulting industry specializing in innovation is its own worst enemy.

It is highly fragmented, often highly specialized in certain innovation practices, and much of the advice comes from a cottage industry of independent practitioners, caught up in executing and little time for advancing their own knowledge.

Risk and Innovation frustrate me

By @paul4innovating November 17, 2015Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Antibodies, Foster Performance, Fresh thinking, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Interests, Polymers, Tackling innovation4 Comments

I have been really struggling in the past few weeks.

Partly a niggling health issue finally got resolved with a ‘delightful’ week in the hospital, a couple of operations later, with a reasonably speedy recovery now thankfully underway.

The plan of course was for me to really use this confinement period as one of those opportunities to catch up on an awful lot of reading around innovation, planning out some areas to focus upon in the coming months and year ahead.

My logic was at the time, well this is similar to a long train journey or flight, you use this time and climb into a number of areas that have been quietly ‘festering’ away in the back of my mind, sitting on my desk or tucked away in my computer.

Building the new dynamics into our capacity to innovate

By @paul4innovating November 5, 2015Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, Improve Collaboration & Communication, innovation execution delivery, Innovation strategy, Polymers, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation2 Comments

Do we know what are the dependencies and requirements for building and sustaining your organizations innovation success?

How do you sustain innovation, is it more through the structuring of everyday work, by creating a particular set of social rules and resources that foster specific routines? Or something different?

We work really hard at maintaining these re-occurring processes, never willing to extend and push them in different and new ways. We have actually become very static in our approaches and learning, we are not learning anew.

We often simply end up with incremental innovation that might just ‘nudge’ the growth needle but does little more than sustain us in the present and can be ‘contained’ in a tidy process that makes many, including the ‘bean counters,’ very happy until someone changes the game.

Then we need to think differently but this is usually far too late.. As demand is more volatile today we need to experiment, explore, learn and adjust. What becomes more important is the ‘work to be done, and how we go about tackling this and not the work done where we often simply ‘default too. Surprisingly Adam Smith identified this important difference in work way back in 1776.

We are transcending traditional industry and product boundaries

By @paul4innovating October 25, 2015Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Foster Performance, Fresh thinking, Improve Collaboration & Communication, innovation execution delivery, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Uncategorized1 Comment

It seems this is the era of the digitally savvy entrepreneur.

With the dizzy array of choices, combined with technical prowess and ‘plugging’ these into ‘seen’ customer needs.

These are setting about disrupting existing businesses and establishing new ones, on an ever-increasing global scale.

So what and how is the incumbent meant to react if it is an existing market?

What should they do when they realize the traditional markets where they have safely operated for years has suddenly been overtaken by a new market creation, one that has gone outside old borders in industry and product.

Markets that are in the hands of the technically savvy entrepreneur are to be sliced, diced and recombined, are providing totally disruptive approaches to existing business models.

If they get the factors right, hit the needs of customers in their design, understanding, agility in responding to learning and adapting, ability to be fast to market and capable of scaling up really fast, then they transform spaces, leaving the established players desperately struggling to find answers and catch up.

The whole world of business is changing radically.

Finding knowledge and research to help you learn and adapt

By @paul4innovating October 8, 2015Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Foster Performance, Improve Collaboration & Communication, innovation execution delivery1 Comment

“The world has never been as complex, dynamic and uncertain as it is today and the pace of change will only increase.”
We hear this consistently, our continual problem is trying to make sense of it.

So much is coming towards us and to assimilate it and turn it into value, usable value, so we can adapt and respond to it in new ways of opportunity by adding further to the knowledge by turning this into new innovation potential.

Seeking out knowledge, and being proactive, partly helps as being consistently caught by surprise makes your world even more insecure.

To attempt to keep up to date we all need to invest increasing time in acquiring a better understanding, a deeper knowledge of all the interconnected parts. Even if we are “time-starved” we simply must try and keep moving along in this understanding.

As part of my job, advising others on all things swirling around innovation, I invest significant time in researching, learning and applying what I feel is important to others, so as to understand or at least to raise their awareness to change practices, thinking or approaches.

At times it all seems to come literally flooding in, overwhelming the senses, that I just have to wait and let it settle in my mind before I can attempt to process it and translate it into something of value to me, then eventually to my clients or readers.

Opening up our innovation to stay relevant

By @paul4innovating October 3, 2015Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Foster Performance, gaining innovation momentum, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Leading innovation, Polymers, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Our whole understanding of innovation is changing; there are numerous shifts occurring.

We are opening up our thinking about where and with whom, to collaborate.

We are evaluating and changing our existing focus from closed (internal orientation) into one that is having a far more open stance. We are searching for more collaborative innovation (external orientation) combining external partners into more ‘collective thinking’.

The shifts taking place are offering us the promise of “extra acceleration” that is needed to improve our innovation performances from concept to market delivery. Or, we hope it is!

Collaborative innovation is also leading us to higher chances of achieving greater impact and success, as nearly all novel ideas lay are mostly outside the organization’s domain of understanding. We need to always bring the knowledge inside and build from it.

As we increasingly include the customer and their more exacting needs within our understanding, these multiple collaborations and dialogues are building this better internal understanding to align our innovation with specific opportunities, relevancy and needs.

The New Innovation Value Chain Perhaps?

By @paul4innovating September 25, 2015Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, gaining innovation momentum, Improve Collaboration & Communication, innovation execution delivery, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation, Uncategorized3 Comments

These are simply some opening thoughts. For a long time, I have become increasingly dissatisfied with the way we have managed or even depicted the innovation value chain.

I really think we should bring it up to date.

There has been such a considerable change taking place in many of the parts of innovation management, I think we need to replace the existing fuzzy front end, the pipeline and portfolio stage followed by execution with something far more reflective of how we think and what we deploy today as tools, methods and frameworks to deliver innovation.

The ‘old approach’ just does not calibrate anymore for me with where we have been heading, or more importantly in how we are attempting to manage innovation within our organizations.

So I feel we need to determine a new innovation value chain and would like to make the first attempt

Seeking fresh winds and new directions

By @paul4innovating September 18, 2015Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, innovation execution delivery, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation1 Comment

Anyone who has felt the ‘full force of the wind’ will know the feeling of how hard it is to keep on your feet, to stay determined to stay upright and true, to hold the course, whatever happens.

When you feel the force of change running through the organization, you tend to have that same sensation, to resist the force with all your energy.

It is often really hard to let go, the environment was something you had become used to, you accepted and become resigned to its weaknesses and constantly exploited its possibilities or even possibly the other way round.

Ignoring the power of choice within change is dangerous

Constructing a climate for any transformation is hard. Our cultures are deep-rooted; we resist those winds blowing into us “full-on,” well beyond being reasonable or smart enough to avoid them before they confront us. The Chinese proverb below gives us a clear choice: “to build walls or build windmills”