Understanding that innovation capital becomes your new core

June 11, 2018Posted inAbsorptive Capacity, Capabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Outcomes & Expectancies

Your new core is innovation capital

Much of my focus within my work is to move organizations towards recognizing and expanding their innovation capital or stock.

The hard part for many organizations is that many of the key elements of innovation capital consist of many intangibles as well as tangibles and this needs deeper understanding and appreciation. These intangibles are in most cases non-technological and embodied in the organizational routines and thinking of the employees.

It is focusing on building the stock of this innovation capital as well as making the flow more dynamic, ever evolving, adapting and changing to the different conditions being presented to the company.

Some of the critical elements that need to be considered can be described as follows:

Putting some dynamic tension into the system

June 8, 2018Posted inAbsorptive Capacity, Capabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Natural & Unnatural tensions

Tension and Dynamics

 

 

 

 

 

There is a growing need for having some dynamic tensions within the organization’s system; these helps generate the better conditions for innovation to thrive. We are learning more on the better tools, techniques and approaches available for putting the learning tensions into our work, making them more dynamic, linked and increasingly relevant to the work to be done.

1). A common language is essential

Any dynamics in the system needs that ability to talk the same language, something that becomes common and embedded to support the routines and move quicker to the concepts and solutions, as others can ‘understand’ them as well. It is through working on the inner stories and appreciating the history, it is having an appreciation of events, good and bad, it is through local slogans, your jargon and dialogues that bring people together. The power of storytelling helps gain adoption and identification to those needs for working on a common cause.

Cracking the complexity code

June 5, 2018Posted inCapabilities and Capacities, Exploratory Walks & Needs, Mapping & Rugged Terrains, System Solution models

There was a good article within the McKinsey Quarterly, published in 2007 entitled “Cracking the complexity code” written by three authors Suzanne Heywood, Jessica Spungin and David Turnbull.

Cracking the complexity code of organizations
Cracking the complexity code of organizations

They lead this article with “one view of complexity that holds that it is largely a bad thing- that simplification generally creates value by removing unnecessary costs”. Certainly we all yearn for a more simplified life, structure, organization, approach to systems or just reducing complexity in our daily lives to find time for what we view as improving its ‘quality’.

Within the article they argue there are two types of complexity – institutional and individual.

Organizational legacy so often chokes innovation

June 4, 2018Posted inAbsorptive Capacity, Capabilities and Capacities, Natural & Unnatural tensions, Pathway dependence curves

 

 

Legacy often chokes new innovation
Legacy often chokes new innovation

Often organizations are weighed down by legacy; it chokes off innovation and much of the potential creativity. This comes in many forms; in its culture, in its history, its core markets or products, in its systems, structures, and processes built around innovation practice.

Today, we are confronted with a very different global marketplace than in the last century. National borders and regulations built to protect those that are ‘within’ in the past have rapidly become a major part of the ‘containing- restraining’ factors that are rendering many previously well-respected organizations as heading towards being obsolete and not in tune with today’s different world where global sourcing determines much.

They are increasingly trapped in declining markets, starved of the new capabilities and capacities to grow a business beyond ‘traditional’ borders, so this means they are unable to take up the new challenges that are confronting them. They see themselves as reliant on hanging on to the existing situation as long as they can, often powerless to make the necessary shifts, failing to open up, finding it increasingly more than difficult to find the ways of letting go, of changing. They are trapped in legacy.

Peeling away the terrain of innovation reality

April 21, 2017Posted inCapabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Fitness Landscaping Regimes, Impact & Scale, Mapping & Rugged Terrains

So do we have a clear understanding of where we are in our current innovation capabilities?

We have to establish a way to map our ‘terrain of reality’ in not just how we are performing but what lost opportunities have slipped through, simply because we lacked the awareness to seize on these opportunities when we first spotted them.

We have significant gaps in our innovation capabilities and competencies. Have you ever really audited them? Taken them through a structured examination?

We do need to achieve a ‘reality’ check or we stay in a state of, forgive me, ignorance. We don’t see the possibilities we only see the possible and in today’s world that is a losers mentality. We need to push ourselves but before we do, we do need to know where we are.

Through my work on building the Innovation Fitness Landscapes that are relevant to you today and then structuring the place you want to be by starting to address the questions: are we focusing on the right ones to deliver on the challenges we are facing?”, “what can we do differently?” and “how can we identify those critical ones”? and “how can these be structured to clearly move us to the new capabilities we require?”

My role here is to be the guide towards building improved innovation capabilities and capacity

My role is to help in this task by identifying the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts‐ and apply the appropriate understanding and identify what resources are needed, so my job is to help you to navigate the terrain. Here is my journey outline described as a typical story that we all need envision and go through.

Through an innovation fitness landscape plan, you can access where you are and what needs to be achieved to get you to the desired point you see as where you need to be.

Do you REALLY want to know how to innovate?

March 20, 2017Posted inCapabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Fitness Landscaping Regimes, Impact & Scale

Applying a lens of discovery:

The basic questions that need to be addressed are:

“what are our dynamic capabilities that will deliver innovation impact?

More importantly: “which ones should we focus upon to improve our capabilities and competencies over the longer-term?

We recognize resources are scarce as our starting point

Yet we fail to understand the makeup of innovation. We still don’t understand the parts that contributes to the ‘dynamics’ of innovation or how they combine for the interdependency of the parts we so often need.

It is all innovation talk, not much real doing.

January 20, 2017Posted inCapabilities and Capacities, Fitness Landscaping Regimes

so-much-talking-innovationAll companies talk about innovation and its growing importance but it seems to me very few succeed in actually doing it on a repeatable scale.

So have you ever asked what inhibits innovation? What would drive innovation success? What aspects of innovation are critical to have so innovative growth can be achieved? Where should a company place its emphasis to gain both an improving impact on its performance and strengthen its innovation capabilities?

Have you ever evaluated your capabilities, competencies, and capacities to innovation in light of a changing landscape?

One where competitors have gained new ground or you have been confronted with a more disruptive product that threatens your established position or has even the potential to threaten your very existence? Your ability to respond to changing positions are often determined by knowing which capabilities and capacities you can call upon and leverage for finding new solutions that accelerate and innovate your position to respond and stay competitive.

If we take the view:

One pressing need in Innovation understanding.

June 15, 2016Posted inCapabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Fitness Landscaping Regimes

building dynamic innovation capabilities 2There is a really pressing need in Innovation to tackle and resolve and that’s our capabilities to innovate.

Yet do we know which are the critical factors for sustaining innovation success? What capabilities are needed to be built? What are not so necessary and will occur more naturally due to us finding these dynamic ones? Also, what capabilities that are in place we can stop investing money into on the mistaken belief they contribute to innovation.

It is becoming increasingly vital to understand those critical innovation capabilities for  an organisation to have in place, so as to deliver on the goals and vision required to grow the business and maintain its health for it to prosper and thrive.

The Orchestrator needs to orchestrate your innovation capabilities.

June 13, 2016Posted inCapabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Exploratory Walks & Needs

Orchestration visual To deliver innovation, sustaining innovation, it needs to be built on dynamic skills, then you have to learn how you can orchestrate the capabilities you have, with those you have to bring in.

Building on those that give the necessary dynamic result you are looking for; to purposefully build what is needed to deliver the required result.

I have reconfigured my thinking around what will influence the evolution leading from building ‘just’ internal innovation capabilities to a whole ‘network effect’ from these.

This work just gets more exciting as it evolves.

It relies on how you purposefully build and construct these capabilities and competencies. The orchestration is fundamentally dynamic, full of uncertainties but the need is still to connect the parts to deliver the right result. We need to orchestrate, to build and then conduct and deliver the right results, to the innovation goals we seek.