The rugged final frontier of innovation – Execution.

September 8, 2011Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Foster Performance, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Leading innovation, Polymers, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

I always smile when people talk about the ‘fuzzy’ front end of innovation, fuzzy tells a story but I think we should name the back end of innovation as rugged to tell an equally important story.

This is the end where the ‘last five yards’ separate the winners from the losers.

The race before then has been made up of often huge quantities of stamina, fortitude, planning, exploration and getting into that necessary innovation rhythm to get yourself within sight of the finishing line, the point when the product, service or business model has one final gasp and passes over that internal finishing line.

The critical passing-through and launch phase where the finished concept goes through that clear defining moment, out into judgement day, where we enter that hostile environment, the marketplace, sometimes too loud cheers, sometimes to defining silence.

Welcome to the real world of judgement where those experienced enough in frontier-ship knows the terrain they are passing over, certainly not for the first time and can manage this again to have a further final successful outcome- better sales!

Hitching your wagons and moving out for the first time.

Dampening down Innovation Productivity risks

September 1, 2011Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, gaining innovation momentum, innovation execution delivery, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation, Uncategorized

With many of the leading developed and developing countries experiencing a contracting economic performance we are getting caught in a ‘catch 22’ situation and we are dampening down our innovation productivity.

The more our firms do not expand, the lower the innovation productivity rate. The lower the productivity rate, the tougher it becomes to improve standards of living, boost skills, deepen capabilities, keep competitive and find those more distinctive new products to grow the market before competitors do.

Innovation productivity actually raises the competitive game

Innovation productivity is actually a sustaining engine for wealth and job creation surprisingly. The more you improve speed, efficiency and scale you attract others to adopt similar approaches.

The rise in productivity happens when others adopt improved ways to equally compete, the benefits start to spread and this drives innovation productivity.

It goes: the more efficient we become, the more effective and that leads to increased innovation opportunities.

What makes innovation sticky?

August 31, 2011Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Foster Performance, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Innovation strategy, Leading innovation, Polymers, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

To achieve success you not only have to have a repeatable process but you have to ensure what is learnt becomes sticky so it can be used again and again.

The company we associate the most with when it comes to ‘sticky’ is 3M for its famous invention of sticky notes. They are used everywhere.

As an aside, I recently came across an even better product where you can ‘write and slide’ your sticky notes so they adhere to any surface and are particularly great for brainstorming or presentation concepts where you want to keep moving them around (sliding them) as your ideas grow and evolve.

These are new on the market developed by a young innovative Finnish company www.stattys.com. These great products allow us to keep something in place to ‘form’ our thinking around, they give us the opportunity to share around and explore.

Motivational Glue

Besides ‘sticky’ we need something I’ll call motivational glue. A glue that binds between knowledge and learning to become a series of building blocks for innovation. These motivate us to keep thinking, pushing and developing our ideas into final products or services.

What are the new paradigms in innovation?

August 26, 2011Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Foster Performance, Improve Collaboration & Communication, innovation execution delivery, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Leading innovation, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

There are some huge shifts taking place across innovation activities, are these paradigm shifts?

The simple fact that innovation has been thrown open and organizations and individuals can simply explore outside their existing paradigms is offering us something we have yet to fully grasp and leverage. This is a W-I-P for us all.

Secondly innovation is simply getting faster, better is another story, but it is expected to move from idea or concept to final launch in ever decreasing compressed time

As they say ‘you can’t have one without the other’. Open innovation is potentially allowing for this compression of time but where we still ‘lag’ is within our organizations to reap the rewards. Why?

We are still stuck in the previous structures, systems and processes designed for internal developments that were designed for different times.

We need two really critical things really fast.

There are two distinct parts to any Innovation Funnel

August 19, 2011Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Foster Performance, Fresh thinking, gaining innovation momentum, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation, Uncategorized

I wrote in an earlier blog called “the new extended innovation funnel” (http://bit.ly/hQTEJz) my reasoning for thinking differently from our traditional view of how the innovation funnel should look like. I feel it should look more like this.

Extended Innovation Funnel – are we really listening?

The ‘classic’ innovation funnel talked about is wrong for todays job!

Innovations ‘rates of exchange’ require better understanding

August 19, 2011Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Leading innovation, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Innovation happens across time. We often constrain our innovation because we ‘shoe horn’ any conceptual thinking into a given time, usually the yearly budgetary plan seems to exercise a large influence in this constraining. We should make the case that different types of  innovation operate and evolve over different time horizons.

I call this the innovation rates of exchange.

A little of the theory: Coherence between organizational context and coordination of outcomes is subject always to those natural tensions of planning, resource allocation and the time imposed. Often decisions have a real tension built into them and they ‘shear’ against the real forces in play.

Like our tectonic plates ‘shear’ and cause earthquakes, the ‘shear’ effect has a disruptive influence on innovation outcomes.

Often the time horizon of possible desired innovation often has these real conflicts. The actual realities and needs of the organization we lower the innovation impact in final delivery. We fall back on incremental solutions as the organization does not have the patience, appetite or desire to see through the potential fully.

So that puts the theory out there.

Economic growth is an outcome of the innovation trajectory we set.

August 7, 2011Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Foster Performance, gaining innovation momentum, innovation execution delivery, Leading innovation, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Today managing innovation is complex; often success is measured and valued by the creative destruction of others.

The ability to ‘evolve’ is very determinant of the knowledge base, either within a given economy or within a ‘federation’ to bring together as something new, offering more value than what is on offer today.

Innovation is highly dynamic in its constant change but also in its need of constant coordination of its parts.

Nations are Very Different

No one nation can just copy another, the same as one business entity cannot simply copy another, each has distinct characteristics, a history and a certain set of ‘physical’ boundaries on where it is located.

Different cultures, and different histories set each Nation apart.

The dual forces within our cultural thinking

August 3, 2011Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Foster Performance, Improve Collaboration & Communication, innovation execution delivery, Innovation strategy, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Leading innovation, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

I lived for about fifteen years in Asia until a short while ago, and in the before and in the in-between period, I travelled there a lot and often felt the pull of different cultural thinking.

Participating in Asia, watching how Asia has evolved has been a real experience, that stays with you as something hugely valuable, as it partly shapes your thinking and how you look at things going on in the world.

Some events today set me thinking that resulted in this blog.

It was August 3rd 2010, exactly one year ago today,  I wrote one of my first blog entries for this site, entitled “The Yin and Yang of Innovation” (http://bit.ly/gXeWir)  and talked about the ‘fluidness’ in innovation that makes it hard to manage. How do you get the balance right in managing the innovation activity?

I described yin yang as polar opposites or seemingly contrary forces that are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other in turn. Opposites thus only exist in relation to each other.
Yin and yang are bound together as parts of a mutual whole

Impact investing for social good through new innovation- a growing momentum?

July 27, 2011Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, gaining innovation momentum, Improve Collaboration & Communication, innovation execution delivery, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

A growing group of investors around the world are increasingly seeking to make investments that generate social and environmental value as well as financial return. Sound impossible?

Well, no actually. There is a growing recognition of the need for effective solutions to social and environmental challenges that have increasingly real threat and growing inequalities.

Impact investing or more often housed under the broader heading of “Impact Economy” is about finding the ways to combine investors, philanthropists, entrepreneurs and business executives along with governments in finding new and different ways to explore the changing economic and social landscape.

Through this emerging newer type of investing there is potentially that the promise of new jobs and profits, mixed in with improved social impact, can be derived from new innovation activities.

It needs this convergence and seems to be gathering in pace and broader recognition.

Can innovation lead us to economic recovery?

July 25, 2011Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Foster Performance, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Innovation strategy, Leading innovation, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

After some recent #innochat debates (www.innochat.com)  around innovation and economic recovery, including the future of Nations, of the US, and of innovation itself and how it needs an organizing framework to work more efficiently,  I wanted to dig a little deeper, to get my own head around all of this.

We do have real problems in the world and we need to find solutions but something strange is happening and I was not sure I understood it. So I’ve been on a little investigative journey that is beginning to make some good sense, well at least to me.

A host of financial contagions has been heaped upon us progressively in recent years.