Building Innovation Capability - Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence

Questioning internally those many product failures

There is a variety of different views on our product failure rates. According to some, the failure rate for new products launched for instance in the grocery sector is 70 to 80 per cent in the US. For smaller US food businesses launching new products, the success rate is even lower around 11 per cent.

These are really high failure rates but is this a myth or reality? How does your organization evaluate product failures? Do you really want to talk about them?

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Lay out the path, get out of the way but give me ambition please.

Today we see a new commission elected in Europe. As a European you always want this to be a new beginning, a new hope, having plenty of ambition, perhaps a new start for Europe.

Jean-Claude Junker has become the new president of the European Commission and along with his new Commission team has been setting out their priorities for regaining momentum for Europe.

I was re-reading Mr Junker’s policy agenda based on “Jobs, Growth, Fairness and Democratic Change” and you realise not just the complexity and challenge all this entails, bringing 28 countries along still, it seems, a pathway that still talks “a single union.”

It prompted this post.
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Building Collective Agility for Innovation

Agility is important to me. For me, agility and innovation have needed to always go together.

I named my company Agility Innovation Specialists and at its core, we state that the value of this focus can offer a real “intensity in innovation” that we believe reflects today’s world of need.

We encourage you to disrupt the accepted, to constantly challenge the current ways and push into uncomfortable territory. We suggest you seek out customers’ unmet needs, and unexplored opportunities to give a new diversity to any thinking, and then we set about accelerating these ideas to fruition. Those all need abundant and constant agility.
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Opening Ourselves Up to the Innovation Mashup

Sometimes some things come slower than others, and then they suddenly rear up and hit you, opening you right up to completely new ways of innovation.

We don’t make all the connections we should; we are too caught up in our little world, beating our existing drum, drowned out by its own noise, to step back and appreciate something new is really happening.

Recently I was investigating one strand of thought and then bingo! Something else leads to something else and the rest, so to speak, becomes history.

I’ve been reflecting on the new era of innovation and opening myself up to exploring alternatives, different thoughts, discussions and viewpoints. Continue reading “Opening Ourselves Up to the Innovation Mashup”

Seeing Your Innovating Future Across Different Horizons

The three horizons offer us much to frame our innovating future
Following a couple of recent posts on reflecting on the three horizons methodology, firstly here and then here, I wanted to come back to where I see real value, in managing your innovating future.

The 3H methodology enables us to look out into the future, across three different horizons that can manage the transition between the short, medium and long term in our innovation activities, something often badly lacking in most organizations’ thinking.

It allows us to gauge the challenges, adding aspects we are beginning to gain a sense of, transitioning from one position to another. It allows us to deepen our evaluation of the innovation portfolio of activities, resources and skillsets across different delivery frames of the short, medium and longer term.
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Three Horizons – fields of future, full of foresight.

I’d like to relate to parts of a book that came out in late 2013 from Bill Sharpe, actually more a booklet, called “Three Horizons: The Patterning of Hope”, published by Triarchy Press, has some really helpful insights that is truly fields of future, full of foresight.

In this book, Bill outlines his distinct ways of creatively working through many of the unknowns, by framing and connecting through the Three Horizons, (3H) as his contribution to the patterning of hope for all our futures.

I draw out a lot from his thinking, experiences and approaches within the book. Some of these initial thoughts outlined here, re-affirm my own thinking and focus on the 3H, specifically for innovation and its management.

Here are some of the ‘triggers’ I connected with strongly from his book:
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Asset Orchestration is Required for more Dynamic Innovation

We all should recognize the incredible power of orchestration that is needed in innovation to bring the initial idea into a final successful commercial concept.

We have an ongoing need to create, extend and modify resources constantly and to achieve this we need to orchestrate and enable those resources to exploit and execute our innovations.

We need to ‘asset orchestrate’.

One of our blind spots is perhaps the focus on pursuing and organizing around innovation just within an organization and not being as aware of all that is externally going on around us.

There are continued and rapid shifts taking place outside the walls of our organizations, constantly occurring and changing, often it becomes a ‘race’ between spotting an opportunity and executing on it before your competitors do, or the market further moves on and it becomes a lost opportunity to have exploited.
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Risk Is Understanding Your Scope of Reach Should Exceed Your Grasp.

We were not born as risk-takers but we can develop it through our own growing self-actualization, creativity, a pursuit for growth and enjoying that feeling of being stretched, going beyond your normal scope of reach.

Well some of us do, but sadly most tend to become risk-avoiding because of the environment they are in or have been associated with for long periods, where avoidance rubs off, it seeps into the soul.

Many enjoy being simply ‘passive’, avoiding anything that smacks of being ‘proactive’; it is safer to be ‘reactive’. Innovation and heaven can equally wait.

Putting it simply most people and organizations are just afraid to take risks and this fear takes over and drives their choices. Innovation is certainly something that suffers from this fear of risk.

Organizations miss critical opportunities, individuals fail to speak out and argue for a given change or innovative idea. We can simply stop growing, to want to become something more, we take the easy option, we avoid risk.
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Exploring the Value Of Your Innovation Capital

Following on from my last post of “Place your future bets- invest in Innovation Capital” which outlined the significant contribution innovation capital plays in our economic growth and value enhancement, let’s explore some more.

Let me offer some further thoughts on its value to really capture and understand, so we can measure it within our organizations.

We have the three components; of physical capital, knowledge capital and human capital that are the innovation-related assets, these make-up Innovation Capital.

I have been arguing that innovation capital draws from the core of intellectual capital and its suggested (and broadly recognized) components of human, structural and relational capitals or social capital.

I have previously discussed this converging up, as the ‘nesting effect’
Innovation capital needs assessing and measuring so we can understand the relationship between these innovation capitals (and their present and future potential) and organization performance. We need to know the innovation capital ‘stock’.

Why, well ‘stock’ can be ‘static’ and we need to make this more ‘dynamic’ so innovation can ‘flow’ from this constant renewing of our capitals and be transformed into new value.
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Recognizing your type of innovation leader

Often innovation succeeds or fails by the personal involvement and engagement of a ‘selected’ few- they make it happen as they are the heavyweights that have the final say.

We all need to recognize the type of innovative leadership personality within our organization, the ones we are working for, as this might help you manage the innovation work a whole lot better and attract the resources you need.

So can you recognize the traits of your innovation leader?

Are they front-end or back-end innovation leaders? Here’s how you can begin to spot the difference.
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