To build a pathway in order to enable more dynamic innovation capabilities one needs to go through Nine Stages.

These nine stages are, in my opinion, needed for developing an understanding of your innovation capabilities, so as to make them more dynamic and, as a result, to be at the top of your innovation game.

This “step process,” I believe, gets you to the point of understanding what innovation capabilities are a better ‘fit’ for the purpose, to deliver on your innovation needs on a consistent, repeatable, and evolving basis.

Building innovation capabilities take time; they are complex, highly structured, and multi-dimensional. Any structured approach to tackling innovation takes time and considerable commitment. Any learning involves sensing, seizing, and then transforming.

We are searching for what makes up the present system and what needs to be part of the future to create a ‘best’ innovation capability environment that is sustainable in the longer-term. Those that can be continually ‘orchestrated’ and constantly adapted to meet the strategic need.

We are striving towards a true ‘innovation coherency premium’ in design, knowing what makes up your core dynamic components. The outcomes are to know where to invest, what to dampen down and what aspects can evolve naturally and be ‘taken along’ – as you focus upon the ones that are more dynamic and relevant to your innovation needs.

Each stage needs questioning and then answering to create specific phases of the journey. Ask yourself the following questions by creating a checklist to start building your own dynamic innovation capability and to understand your innovation fitness and landscape. 

1.Getting Started – understanding the needs & imperatives of innovation fitness

• Why we must travel this critical path for Innovation.
• The meaning of dynamic capabilities and innovation fitness landscapes
• Merging the theory with practical reality to produce new outcomes and positive results.
• Focusing on resources and performance – why is this important.
• The problem is knowing what we have and what we really need and seeing the differences

2.The Fuel of Innovation Performance – the dynamics of innovation

• A sharper, clearer focus on innovation resources to meet the strategic need.
• What is known about resources to sustain, enhance performance?
• Knowing and aligning your strategic criteria – for sound innovation approaches
• Getting innovation within the right context of your business
• Moving your resources in the right direction takes courage and decisive leadership.

3.Getting Even More Specific – quantification and qualification

• Recognising the building of scale, change rates, and dynamics that happen over time and why we need to constantly build our innovation capabilities.
• Developing the resources to meet the need – structured, focused, clarified by bringing out the necessary discussion.
• An illustrative scenario for a directional innovation fitness landscape map
• Recognising that resources can stretch beyond the firm and then bringing these in successfully, in gradual steps. Managing within a more open environment.
• Achieving mutual dependencies to support; recognising the hindering ones
• Being aware of the impact of different scenarios in the management of innovation allows for designing a flexible response capability.

4.Building the Innovation Fitness Machine – reinforcing feedback, identifying needs

• Recognising the current status, spotting emerging patterns, seeing spaces and gaps, and identifying solutions.
• Beginning the ‘adaptive walk’ to get to higher fitness points needed to compete.
• Clarifying the complementary resources, looking to embed new routines quickly, and set up follow through approaches.
• Introducing natural tensions into the system to trigger ‘step change.’
• Resource dependence climate, culture, diversity, intensity, and uniqueness
• Reinforcing feedback – watching for dangers, managing the machine capacity, removing the brakes selectively
• Shifting your resources need not deplete or force other people to compete for them – working through the tensions within teams and silos.
• Matching resource dynamics with the innovation value chain & life cycle stages helps maintain momentum.
• Simulation modelling the ‘what ifs’ and ‘why.’

5.The Strategic Architecture – designing the system to perform as needed

• The step process for designing and executing the architecture design
• Diagnosing performance challenges and roadblocks – resolving, moving on
• Lining up the solutions is not a linear process and needs careful management
• Addressing the effects of intangibles in the Strategic Architecture.

6.The Hard Face of Soft(er) Factors – the hidden power of intangible resources

• Clarifying the impact of the intangibles and recognising that time, climate, and conditions are significant contributors to innovation activities.
• The different rivalry types: internal and external, inter-department, inter projects, and working through resolutions to these.
• Reflecting feelings and expectations, addressing all the different needs
• Measuring the tougher parts of intellectual capital
• The real value of your intangible resources
• Recognising the value of hidden innovation and spotting its occurrence

7.Entering into Competitive Battle – the dynamics of rivalry, the uniqueness of you

• Recognising, developing, capturing, transforming, avoiding, and outmanoeuvring
• Your point of choosing what, where, how, and when to compete.
• Building capabilities that are unique to you and hard to replicate
• Building sustainability into the innovation equation as ongoing
• Extending the turf, exploiting the situation, pushing beyond, seeking partners.

8.Building and Testing Capabilities to Perform

• Measuring capabilities through different fitness levels and scale
• Learning to build capabilities as ‘ongoing’ and evolving for changing needs
• Re-Structuring the process for dealing with the dynamics of change
• Knowing the points of impact on performance to enable recognition and reality
• Managing innovation performance progressively across the spectrum of business need through testing and extending capability learning.
• Building from personal to the team, to organisational learning, in measured steps
• Recognising the role of leadership, achieving strategic alignment, and working on broadening out innovation competence at different organisational levels.

9.Keeping the Innovation Fitness Wheels Turning, keeping your eyes on the road

• Resolution of conflicting goals, control, and structure
• Dissecting conflicting positions, resolving the impasse
• Knowing the limits of human engagement
• Goals, controls, and measurements can dominate and strangle
• Keeping the measurements simple and clear
• Managing innovation as a critical strategic resource
• Merging the results into a greater alignment to strategy and approaches

The end result is looking to generate your innovation fitness landscape. If you need any coaching help, advice, or mentoring through this process, just get in touch with me here. 

The post A pathway towards building your dynamic innovation capabilities first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

These are some opening thoughts that I felt needed to just “hang out there” and see where they take me and clearly, you as a reader.

The issue I am reflecting upon is our growing concern that we all are living in a world heading towards digital overload, with the risk of it simply overwhelming us, perhaps we are becoming more isolated and detached within this.

We can’t simply rely on focusing around ‘all things’ digital, we need people to bring the insights and their experience together for the eventual innovation solutions. We need to provide a curators platform for innovation, to make all the essential connections.

Learning is changing, are we absorbing or just simply gathering?

What can we do to solve this? Perhaps to offer a service on building a specific content platform. In this case around innovation. It has to be built on a more fluid, responsive and constant flow of knowledge. It cannot be static it has to be highly dynamic, it needs to relate to each of us specifically but be broad enough to cater for the wider community within innovation looking for innovation knowledge and understanding.

Yet what are some of the principles we need?

Any curation platforms for innovation need is to reduce and define any “signal & noise”ratio effect. What is needed to build one that helps us all learn more about the needs within innovation understanding?

So I have sat down and am attempting to put some of my opening thoughts on the value and reasons to think about the role of an innovation curator, its place, and justification. So this piece is simply placing some “stakes in the ground” to build from, to give a ‘certain’ foundation to build upon. These are preliminary thoughts that I wanted to capture and revisit later but I thought I’d share some of my (rambling) thoughts here. I’m not sure it makes a cohesive sense yet but here we go:

• You need to anchor and establish clear coordinates into the innovation world.

Keys have to be: know how to narrow the vision, construct the ‘appropriate’ content that is required (needs related driven), understanding the differences in true value and screen out the noise factor and build up the sensing signal. Providing a clear access to a depth of knowledge and understanding of innovation and its make-up- building a true curating platform, managing across the total innovation environment, one that continues to build the more it attracts knowledge and contributions.

• Managing innovation in its totality – Placing “trust” inside

So often the power lies in the story, knowing how to construct this and being a really active listener and responder needs curation. Like Huffington Post or Forbes you want to build the source that can be trusted, knowing there is quality, knowledge, and expertise in what is being offered and sitting ‘inside’ as the core processor, delivering the ‘power’ of innovation understanding in outcomes.

• Building on themes, driving quality and engagement

The audience you would be expecting is one that both ‘requires and demands’. Pushing out general, generic articles has limited value, the ‘need’ is to have clear ‘content curation strategies’ that a) drive traffic to build ongoing value for each person wanting to know, b) provide growing scale and ‘broad’ connection and association so you build a growing body of networked understanding, c) establish opportunities to engage deeper with individuals, teams and organizations that can lead on to building greater innovation capability, d) that provoke discussion, exchanges, and engagement in vibrant communities, looking to engage, build and share, e) tell those ‘richer and relevant’ stores that make the relevant connection that comes from this story sharing building valuable narratives that can be ‘taken away’ and applied.

• Moving from broadcast to human

The broadcasting effect is what is giving much of our present overload. We rapidly tune out to anything that we ‘sense through a ‘skim and move on’ approach that is not in our “lens of understanding”.  How do we build a community platform of trust? It needs to be more from human engagement to augment ‘machine learning’. Building a coaching, mentoring capacity, so that you can constantly be checking back on “knowing the difference between real (immediate) value, building up new value and nice to know and useful”. Feedback and engagement become essential, building and offering “plausible foresight”. Robert Wolcott, a professor at North-West University suggested we are moving towards a “sensory overload”. How can we discern differences that allow us to separate this flow of information into knowledge we need or can apply from its value.

• We are known more and more by the ‘digital content we wear’

More and more our digital presence is becoming our clothing; it reflects (to others) what we stand for, it present ‘us’ to the world, what we stand for, value and care about. Social media enables us but it determines us. How we wrap this becomes our voice and this needs to project authentic and trusted positions. It should promote curiosity and try to be thought-provoking. Curating for this authentic position needs cutting through much of this “signal & noise” effect to ground our thinking in more informed ways

• Contextual value and content management

Defining the quality of engagement, in voicing opinions needs a highly open listening stance. Any “going-in” may change as you learn what has real value, what engages, what “matters to me”.  Becoming a good listener allows for the potential to alter your views on what “sways you” in opinions, as they ‘seem’ reasonable, heard from others, grounded in a growing ‘body of evidence’ and application from ‘real’ experience.

• How can we find more “time out” and provide more space to become more reflective?

It is through listening that this becomes a powerful source of change as you combine understanding and work together to make the change. There is a need for a constant searching and relevance building, giving ‘voice and evolving (relevant) stories’, constructing content that moves the searcher of knowledge towards ‘greater’ solutions. Encouraging a network of “being aware” where the value is in this growing network of relationships where we all are open to learning, others gain and we share in this.

• Content management systems need purposeful design
  

Increasing curation tools make linking seem easy; you can drag and drop, search and find, to build content curation, you receive increasing ‘intelligence’ to what you need or are looking for. This works within social engagement, person to person if you allow it but it gets considerably harder for innovation specific issues, problems or knowledge transfer as more than often we are dealing with unique situations. We can learn from others, set specifically in their context so we can gain better understanding but it can’t be simply lifted up and placed into our situation.

• The building of personal knowledge is relating to others experiences.
  

The more we build personal knowledge, through experience and experimentation we can build on that sense of passion, experience, reputation and “pulling out the headlines” that provoke, bundle and encourage participation and reactions. We move into “seeing beyond” possibilities because we opened our thinking up.

So what makes up a good curator?

In summary, the best knowledge curator is both a distributor and a collector, so any curating platform needs to equally be set up to arrange and re-order to meet needs, to communicate a balanced opinion.

The curator should work to a consistent rhythm, can operate equally as a filter and funnel, has that ability to magnify at the right time and is seen as capable of being well plugged in, possessing a deep broad knowledge about the subject of innovation.

Today we need far more curators within our lives, to assist us and help shape our thinking in new and exciting ways and get on with innovating in better informed ways than the past.

So some preliminary thoughts, now I have to think where I want to go with this.

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The post The Value of Having A Curators Platform for Innovators first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The world is increasingly uncertain and to steer through this we need new ways to access, attract and accumulate understanding.

Knowledge is highly intangible. Today it is less to do with the “stocks” of knowledge we have the ability to keep refreshing and that means increased participation in the relevant “flows” of knowledge.

Knowledge is becoming even more of our competitive edge. It is making this incoming knowledge tacit, relevant to us and this comes increasingly from our connections into networks and who and what we want to search out and connect with.

Broad observations of Knowledge include:
• Knowledge is intangible
• Knowledge arises from information and thus from the interpretation of data
• Knowledge has some, but not all, of the characteristics, we associate with capital
• Knowledge can be instantiated in various ways
• Knowledge derives value from its use in human activity
• Knowledge cannot easily be aggregated
• Knowledge evolves
• Knowledge is created and exploited through networks
• The distribution of knowledge is as important as its ‘quantity’

We need to treat knowledge as passing through hindsight, through foresight into insight. It is when you combine tacit knowledge where experience matters and it is in the new connections you advance your thinking.

John Hagel writes on his edgeperspectives posting site often some great insights and in one of his posts, he discussed “Defining the Big Shift” – measuring the forces of change.

Let me, here, summarize key aspects relating to knowledge, quoting John, and how it is shifting to flow.

From knowledge stocks to knowledge flows. We are moving from the world where the source of strategic advantage was in protecting and efficiently extracting value from a given set of knowledge stocks – what we know at any point-in-time.

From knowledge transfer to knowledge creation. The greatest economic value will come from finding ways to connecting relevant yet diverse people, both within the firm and outside it, to create new knowledge.

From explicit knowledge to tacit knowledge. Just at the time when more and more information is becoming available about more things, the most valuable knowledge is the knowledge that is in the early stages of emergence and this is generally the most difficult to express.

From transactions to relationships. The transactional mindset undermines the ability to build long-term, trust based relationships and in the absence of those relationships it becomes almost impossible to effectively participate in the knowledge flows that matter the most.

From zero-sum to positive sum mindsets. With a zero-sum mindset, your gain is my loss, we undermine building the long-term relationships. Yet if we adopt a positive sum mindset – through increasing collaborations we build trust relationships. This becomes a virtuous cycle that builds on itself.

From push programs to pull programs. Push tends to impose routines and predictability and is good at extracting ‘stock’, whereas scalable pull programs effectively access and attract resources that are attracted to support and improve performance to enable knowledge to flow.

From institutions driven by scalable efficiency to institutions driven by scalable peer learning.  Institutions often become the barriers to effective participation. in knowledge flows. Fostering scalable peer learning can create learning landscapes that encourage individuals to develop their talent in collective, sharing pools.

From stable environments to dynamic environments. We are moving from relatively stable business environments to ones of rapid change with ever more disruptions, uncertainty, and unpredictability. The management practices need to address these shifts that turn instability and uncertainty into opportunity and reactions.

Fusion, Flow, and Fluidity are needed in our management practices

We need to build the foundations of knowledge that builds stock but then allows it to flow and have a greater impact. We are in a world of constant learning, recognizing predictability is falling away constantly.

We need to focus on scalable learning, not scalable efficiency and that needs this shift from “stock” to “flow” to accelerate learning rather than focus on the narrow path of just simply expanding data known.

We need to go out to seek diverse flows of knowledge, from adjacent and even seemingly unrelated domains and constantly ask that age-old question “not knowing what it is you don’t know” and actively seek out knowledge flows that offer new understanding. Being open to a constant knowledge flow

Being open to a constant knowledge flow allows small ideas, concepts or seeds of value to be set in motion to bigger things that lead to greater innovation and personal growth. Moving from stock to flow is absolutely essential in today’s world to keep exploring it and what it can and does offer.

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The post Seeking out new Knowledge that Flows first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

For instance a lack of resources, an overcrowded portfolio of ideas, a lack of dedicated people, treating innovation as a one-off, keeping it isolated and apart from mainstream activities.

Yet many are simply hidden and need surfacing and require often an outside perspective.

Here are ten really important barriers, that can hold innovation back.

• Addressing the issue of unfamiliar responsibilities – new and different ways of working, of understanding, of allowing innovation to take hold and flourish is often demanding. It becomes even harder when innovation is often added simply increasing a person’s responsibilities. It is often raising the unfamiliar yet it should become a great place to start this dialogue to bring innovation inside on what we currently do to change the perspective.

• Innovation demands new directions – making significant changes to the way the organization is run is very challenging, potentially disrupting and needs thinking through at the top-level well. We are needing to become 21st century in our thinking and practices how do we open up the dialogue Where does agility, flexibility, adaptive and exploratory come into our thinking, into our systems, into our culture?

• Inherited problems always surface – addressing countless and inherent problems is messy and requires dedicated resolution. Changing a culture to become more innovative can be a massive step in structure, organization, and policies. How do we manage such a revolution, what is needed, what is a culture and environment for innovation anyway? How do we manage our legacy, what should stay, what can go? How do we set about this?

• Problems within the organization’s makeup – inadequate experience and resistance to change especially surface when a person is not equipped to deal with it. Installing innovation capacity, capabilities and competencies need figuring out. How long does this take, where can we turn too? How do we relate change to its positive contribution to the future and can innovation lead that change?

• High stakes of innovation – demanding ‘breakthrough innovation’ makes everyone feel increasing vulnerable, increasingly visible and it is for leadership to take ownership and real responsibility to manage this demand and shape the risk and set of fears against the gain and return. Can you run breakthroughs alongside incremental innovation activities, what is really different in how can we manage these, building a ‘dual’ mentality?

• Scope, speed, and scale of innovation – Managing at speed, scale and scope are demanding and requires well thought through systems and processes. To scope, innovation needs robust business case approaches, its flexibility in its management and then to scale this up requires well-established approaches and clear commitments to its engagement and execution. Are we really good at seizing ‘breaking’ opportunities and quickly scaling these up? Can we learn new approaches to this? How do we approach to scale, scope and speed for innovation?

• External pressures multiply – everyone has an opinion outside the organization, let alone inside. Balancing these different interfaces and the pressures from these as you explore innovation needs managing well. Avoid that mistake of just piling on the raising of expectations and then failing to back this up. What can we learn by listening to those outside, what can we take inside and apply? Do we have we our core beliefs to check these opinions against to stay firm upon or adapt by these new insights?

• Influencing without full authority – key activities within innovation usually demand that you become reliant on others. You need to spend increasing time on the ‘buy in’ for others to gain their own identification with concepts. You often need to find often imaginative ways of attracting across the resources needed. Today people want to be attracted and expect to learn from the experience and exposure and then be released to move on to the next challenge where their talent is most needed.

•  Work more with a listening and feedback culture – this can be totally different from the way business has been conducted up to today, flattening organizations aim to allow greater two-way flow but this sucks up time. It takes a time to establish and gain the confidence and momentum as you need to allow more time for debate, so as to allow innovation to truly flourish on a more sustaining basis. What needs to be re-calibrated?

• The need to develop work group diversity – innovation asks for more diversity in opinion, it draws out more in thinking through alternative approaches to solutions. It can challenge often their very notion of management as many have known and experienced it. How can we encourage a greater diversity of thought, of working, of judging, applying the differences in our ‘collective’ thinking?

To summarize

Each of these ten innovation barriers needs to be surfaced at the right time. To bring them out might need an experienced external facilitator of innovation, to let them probe, prompt and push to find the emerging answers to often these hidden and often ‘intractable’ challenges.

If we can confront these challenges, we can unlock them and make them the basis of the future building blocks and not barriers to greater innovation.

** This list has been inspired by “creating learning experiences without changing jobs” by Cynthia McCauley at the CCL in 2006.

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The post Solving root causes of innovation blockage first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

For instance a lack of resources, an overcrowded portfolio of ideas, a lack of dedicated people, treating innovation as a one-off, keeping it isolated and apart from mainstream activities.

Yet many are simply hidden and need surfacing and require often an outside perspective.

Here are ten really important barriers, that can hold innovation back.

• Addressing the issue of unfamiliar responsibilities – new and different ways of working, of understanding, of allowing innovation to take hold and flourish is often demanding. It becomes even harder when innovation is often added simply increasing a person’s responsibilities. It is often raising the unfamiliar yet it should become a great place to start this dialogue to bring innovation inside on what we currently do to change the perspective.

• Innovation demands new directions – making significant changes to the way the organization is run is very challenging, potentially disrupting and needs thinking through at the top-level well. We are needing to become 21st century in our thinking and practices how do we open up the dialogue Where does agility, flexibility, adaptive and exploratory come into our thinking, into our systems, into our culture?

• Inherited problems always surface – addressing countless and inherent problems is messy and requires dedicated resolution. Changing a culture to become more innovative can be a massive step in structure, organization, and policies. How do we manage such a revolution, what is needed, what is a culture and environment for innovation anyway? How do we manage our legacy, what should stay, what can go? How do we set about this?

• Problems within the organization’s makeup – inadequate experience and resistance to change especially surface when a person is not equipped to deal with it. Installing innovation capacity, capabilities and competencies need figuring out. How long does this take, where can we turn too? How do we relate change to its positive contribution to the future and can innovation lead that change?

• High stakes of innovation – demanding ‘breakthrough innovation’ makes everyone feel increasing vulnerable, increasingly visible and it is for leadership to take ownership and real responsibility to manage this demand and shape the risk and set of fears against the gain and return. Can you run breakthroughs alongside incremental innovation activities, what is really different in how can we manage these, building a ‘dual’ mentality?

• Scope, speed, and scale of innovation – Managing at speed, scale and scope are demanding and requires well thought through systems and processes. To scope, innovation needs robust business case approaches, its flexibility in its management and then to scale this up requires well-established approaches and clear commitments to its engagement and execution. Are we really good at seizing ‘breaking’ opportunities and quickly scaling these up? Can we learn new approaches to this? How do we approach to scale, scope and speed for innovation?

• External pressures multiply – everyone has an opinion outside the organization, let alone inside. Balancing these different interfaces and the pressures from these as you explore innovation needs managing well. Avoid that mistake of just piling on the raising of expectations and then failing to back this up. What can we learn by listening to those outside, what can we take inside and apply? Do we have we our core beliefs to check these opinions against to stay firm upon or adapt by these new insights?

• Influencing without full authority – key activities within innovation usually demand that you become reliant on others. You need to spend increasing time on the ‘buy in’ for others to gain their own identification with concepts. You often need to find often imaginative ways of attracting across the resources needed. Today people want to be attracted and expect to learn from the experience and exposure and then be released to move on to the next challenge where their talent is most needed.

•  Work more with a listening and feedback culture – this can be totally different from the way business has been conducted up to today, flattening organizations aim to allow greater two-way flow but this sucks up time. It takes a time to establish and gain the confidence and momentum as you need to allow more time for debate, so as to allow innovation to truly flourish on a more sustaining basis. What needs to be re-calibrated?

• The need to develop work group diversity – innovation asks for more diversity in opinion, it draws out more in thinking through alternative approaches to solutions. It can challenge often their very notion of management as many have known and experienced it. How can we encourage a greater diversity of thought, of working, of judging, applying the differences in our ‘collective’ thinking?

To summarize

Each of these ten innovation barriers needs to be surfaced at the right time. To bring them out might need an experienced external facilitator of innovation, to let them probe, prompt and push to find the emerging answers to often these hidden and often ‘intractable’ challenges.

If we can confront these challenges, we can unlock them and make them the basis of the future building blocks and not barriers to greater innovation.

** This list has been inspired by “creating learning experiences without changing jobs” by Cynthia McCauley at the CCL in 2006.

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The post Solving root causes of innovation blockage first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

How do we show the real difference that innovation can provide?

I believe we have eight needs to achieve.

Each of us will arrive at our own personal understanding of what this “all means”.

Innovation is about achieving difference so if we all arrived at the same point of understanding then we actually are defeating ourselves from the very beginning

So what are these eight ‘triggering’ points? Briefly Part one is here:

Exploring the second four below ( the first four are here )

Translating Knowledge into Value

• We need to understand absorptive capacity
• How do we set about accessing capacity?
• What do we need to anchor capacity?
• What means do we diverse capacity?
• How do we determine and translate the richer insights?
• What does transformation mean to you?
• How does transformation become real and insightful?
• What ways will you amplöify the signals of innovation opportunity?

The Art and Science of Exploiting and Exploring

• Understanding different organizational design
• The meaning of an ambidextrous organization
• Setting about the creation of value
• How we think and act to generate different needs
• What skills are different to manage this dual design?
• How do you shift thinking mindsets, ensure successful handovers
• The ability to differentiate innovation strategy to work in this design
• Gap identification and how to resolve this

Creating Sustaining Value

• Building the vision, values and required culture
• Knowing and recognizing value creation
• Making those value propositions as the everyday occurrence
• Building the Innovation Business Model Alternatives
• Recognizing Asset Orchestration- structuring, bundling and leveraging
• How to re-energise and build a powerful innovation engine
• Equipping all with the necessary skills and behaviors to innovate
• Building the ability to connect, exploit and explore the blank spaces

Placing it all into Context is essential to resolve

• The power of context shifts everything and then gives it ‘shape’.
• Context provides the innovation marching orders.
• Placing innovation in context allows for understanding as innovation is often inherently messy.
• Context gives us certain guard rails or borders to help gain a more united focus.
• The ‘setting it in context’ allows for dialogue, adding more value to the thinking.
• Knowing the context allows us to engage.
• Context needs to also become, increasingly the arbitrator of success.
• Context gives knowledge into the hands of others to go and work on finding possible solutions.
• Knowing the context gives us something highly relevant to judge eventual outcomes on.
• Of course, context is going to be fluid, we constantly adapt to new insights
• Context must lead, functionality and capability then flows from this and will follow as we gain new understanding
• Context in the eventual design and outcome needs constant recalibrating.
• Context gives our innovation activity its meaning and sense of purpose.
• the real innovation lesson is in the value of the Power of Context.

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The post Differentiating Yourself Part Two first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

One of the useful ideas of using an external resource is to put additional coordinates into your innovation world, they see contradictions in a different way and can assist in working through the conflicting signals, so as to help align innovation in helpful and thoughtful ways. Certainly the innovators role is not an easy one inside the structured world of larger business entities.

I like practical advice with evidence, it helps bridge misunderstanding. This can come through a variety of methods:  benchmarking, validating, frameworks and interpreting how innovation can fit with your current or future needs. Often the outside advice can place innovation into a greater context that can accelerate the outcomes you need to gain understanding and achieve increasing identification.

The value of the external  innovation specialist has great value in insights

It has a very powerful combination effect if the advice is right. In my case, I try to offer operational experience drawn from the client’s input and my own understandings of being involved in business, at varying levels, in many markets and industries. This providing a cross-industry experience and detachment from your world becomes valuable to arm you with greater insights so you can relate your innovation activity, even more, it can become even more grounded or questioned.

The other main contribution comes from common sense and intuition.

Receiving thoughts that feed into your own instinct or conflict with it give a terrific and fast sounding board. It remains outside the politics and constraints of your organization. It gives a different sense of perspective and verification.

In does not matter if these are micro-learning moments (quick answers to immediate need) or those deeper more macro learning ones (to learn specifically a new subset of innovation), it is by having the opportunity to put different coordinates into your thinking that can be offered by the external advisor can bring significant value and save value time.

What slips under your personal radar can also partly be picked up

Not just in those moments of need but by having an ongoing relationship with an external coach, advisor or mentor you can benefit from critical updates and insights, that might have slipped under your radar dues to your focus on getting the work done. You can have set up interim reports that focus on a given theme or topic of interest that you don’t have the necessary time to investigate yourself, you can gain from field research, breaking innovation reports on topics of need and interest and you can encourage your team to equally tap into this innovation knowledge vault.

The recognition is in knowing and appreciating

It is recognizing the value of having someone just a call or email away who can provide backup value in insights or knowledge gives you a significant edge.

Why reinvent the wheel when others might already have your wheel size ready and waiting to fit?

Give me a call to see if this might be a valuable supporting service to you and what you are looking to achieve in innovation outcomes.

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The value of having an innovation guide, mentor or coach helps you accelerate through both these needs and learning opportunities. I see four points of value, my value proposition, if you like, for you to achieve personal innovation growth:

1. Gaining knowledge gives you growth, impact and return. Others seek you out to understand
2. Translating knowledge into value deepens your value, increases your worth and gaining respect
3. If you are able to put the co-ordinates into your innovation world you have a clear compass to proceed
4. The External Innovation Catalyst prompts your thinking, accelerates your understanding and guides you on this personal learning journey of innovation understanding.

The key aspects of working with an expert in innovation are numerous. Let me provide a few:

• That person can provide you an objective view
• They introduce a fresh perspective, they shift your thinking forward
• They can help bring concepts to life
• They can solve potential gaps in your thinking or knowledge understanding
• They become your personal advisor to work with as you go.
• They can offer validation points along your journey
• As external providers, they can spot and even amplify the trends for your learning curve
• They offer a different ‘angle’ on your challenges and objectives
• They can map parts of the innovation puzzle to the whole.
• They can simply show the way or point you in ‘given’ directions
• They can advocate, guide and inform on a variety of innovation needs and your questions
• Gives navigation and feedback
• They are independent and can be detached from internal barriers to help “bunker bust” and accelerate innovation awareness

Irrespective on how you see and value an external innovation expert who can guide, advise and mentor they can take you through three steps

1. Help you discover and explore relevant innovation approaches
   
2. Enable you to generate and convert innovation understanding faster
3. They can exploit and leverage a ‘collective’ knowledge and wisdom built up over time and experience.

There is a real need to accelerate innovation understanding. The best person to deliver the innovation message is the one that is well equipped to see its value, purpose, and potential to transform “where you are” into “where you could possibly be” through the pursuit of an innovation growth strategy.

It is all about the translation points in innovation guidance and finding the time to engage with the external catalyst of innovation understanding. It can potentially offer an exponential return to you, your team and your organization’s innovation activity if you have the desire to build your innovation capabilities.

Want to find out more? Have you the time, it might be really worth it?

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The post The Value in Personal Innovation Learning Journeys first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

When I was thinking through this concept I fell back into onto one of my most valuable techniques to work through, clustering a set of questions and capturing all the different thinking through the use of Mind Mapping techniques. Such a valuable tool.

A selection of maps that included: what a curator can do in innovation, of painting a picture of a strong advocacy practice, of working through a guiding approach, the need to reflect on the whole facilitation process, etc., and each brainstorm takes a time to work through, build and formalize. The end result becomes a much richer landscape of what I can offer and what equally might be needed.

It is such a pity we can’t really reproduce mind maps, apart from the original mind map in better ways as one thing I have constantly seen, one person’s mind map can be very hard for others to relate too, so we revert to other means to explain how we got to a given point.

I started my thinking on the premise of being an “Innovation Knowledge Provider“, something I have been working on for a number of years. This has been progressively built up in content provision, offering views on innovation alternatives, mixed in with some emerging solutions that seemed to fit the gaps I often found missing in innovation structures or thinking. The need was to solve problems and challenges both in my mind and the mind of the person(s) engaged in innovation practices on a consistent daily or project basis.

In this knowledge acquiring, I wanted to maintain a more impartial position, even when at times I ‘screamed’ at some comments I was reading as they seemed so naive or incomplete, so I kept going, consistently building this innovation intelligence.  By being an avid collector of innovation intelligence, relating to it and shaping it’s worth further when necessary, or simply ‘passing it on’ with my ‘own take’ as a practitioner of innovation.

Actually, I recently realized I’ve been at this collecting, dispensing, absorbing innovation for over fifteen years in an increasing dedicated fashion. So I believe this ‘collected knowledge’ should be unlocked and advocated in even more focused ways, so it can be designed and built around the individuals’ innovation learning journey, so as to advance and support their role in innovation delivery.

The ultimate messages I wanted to arrive at were eight keyframing points

• Be seen as a specialist for innovation understanding. Someone who can be seen as a trusted authority, who can separate the noise from the research-based intelligence.
• Narrow the field of vision. I have wandered far and wide in understanding innovation and its management and often go on many of my own ‘walkabouts’ to broaden out my understanding. Most people do not have the dedicated time or focus, or clarity of purpose that I wanted to put into this to get to get this innovation into clearer fields of vision as a given as-a-service point.
• Finding the true purpose. How do we design, explain, explore and unlock the knowledge within all this? Recognizing innovation has a purpose, it is to improve, advance and succeed in finding solutions to go beyond what we have. How can I draw these out and deliver the value needed?
• Develop the power to persuade. Getting to a mutual point of relating and learning and delivering ‘digestible’ innovation knowledge insights, so as to help others who are often starved of time, yet have the interest and need to listen and learn in focused ways. Equally to test and find out if my working principle will work: “if you wish to have value for money would you give money for value“
• Discovering what are your Challenges? Wanting to find the ways and means to overcome barriers and challenges and resolve these in ‘multiple ways (coaching, mentoring, advising, guiding, facilitating) and accelerating the learning to break through these immediate “moments of need” or deepen the specialized focus, as appropriate.
• Structuring the Exploring Process. How to build synthesis and analysis along with divergence and convergence, just as design thinking proposes to work through in any discovery, design, and delivery, offering a dedicated space to truly learn.
• Structuring a transforming process of a person and their team. The ultimate goal is to both impart and then transform what is known, alongside what is unknown or not recognized, into something potentially (so) radically different that it often changes perceptions and understandings. A goal is to achieve those breakthrough moments of recognition and empowerment, to allow for innovation to break out of the incremental trap it is often stuck in,  as one of the barriers to learning and recognizing a different thinking pathway.
• Recognizing each of us has a personal and unique innovation pathway to travel. How do you scale uniqueness, how do you deliver in discreet bespoke ways, how do you identify that personal innovation learning journey? Here certainly does lie the dilemma to resolve: to find the means and (multiple) ways to deliver this innovation learning in highly relevant and focused ways.

With an end result of delivering different outcomes as value points to the client

Ones that give Growth, impact, and return that provide appropriate fit and learning values

That capitalize on me as the External innovation catalyst that prompts thinking and imparts lasting insights and knowledge

A delivery outcome that is Translating knowledge into value by deepening the understanding and connections

Achieving that putting the clear co-ordinates into your innovation world through orchestrating and establishing a learning rhythm that works for you to build your capacity and capabilities to innovate far more successfully than before.

Final (initial) thoughts here

Do I pivot as I learn what the market needs? Of course, it is where this service does actually fit within innovation-as-a-service? The value is in the recognition of need

What am I actually capable of delivering and by what means?

As I stated this is no easy task, the more I think it through the more it evolves but I am absolutely certain there is a real need for accelerating innovation understanding. We need it for all our futures to grow and build and resolve many known and unknown innovation challenges

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The post Fitting understanding into the innovation puzzle first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I have been struck by the emphasis on personal learning and development. We still get very caught up in the need for scale yet it is the ability and flexibility to design these to our individual pathway that becomes “the order of the day”. The constant struggle is for each of us in simply stopping to focus, finding the time and the last thing you can afford to do, is take an ad-hoc approach to this, it needs a structured design.

This is where external facilitation might help

As we work through our own learning pathways, it does imply knowing where you are heading or required to head and sometimes that may not be so clear, it needs to be shaped and informed. This needs to have a reasonable understanding of the existing ‘inventory’ of knowledge, experience, learning style preferred and engagement considerations, then it needs setting up in tracking, categorizing and organizing yourself, establishing the methods of knowledge delivery.

This how it is ‘pulled together,’ becomes the crucial part, in its individual parts to mesh into the final ‘whole’ needed. Much of this needs some level of facilitation, some constant conversations, and interactions so all the necessary dots can get connected in a more blended learning environment.

We need to access those who have deep understanding, who can help you think in small chunks of learning, ones who can help move you from the old ‘event’ mentality into this consistency in learning journey, can blend different learning approaches, encourage application and recognize it is not a ‘one size fit all’ world but learning is personal and needs to be authentic and relevant to personal needs. To speed all of these up it needs to be far more collaborative, sharing, discussional opportunities and full of many ‘recognition/ validation’ moments.

Our learning today is moving into two distinct parts.

These are increasingly split into two – the moment of need where you want a quick read, a refresh or enough to take you through that moment to carry you along in understanding and experience gaining, these are called our “micro-learning” points where we quickly consume a post, article or how to go about this. Then we have a lasting need to deepen our knowledge, a dedicated space to truly learn a whole new domain of knowledge that we need to bring into our learning pathway. These are called “macro-learning” needs.

Our past ways of learning, more through formal instruction is just not up to the task today. We are in environments that we all are time-starved, digitally bombarded, socially drowning in as a sea of needed to give our attention immediately and respond. Yet we are still expected to stay fully tuned into our connected world, so as to understand what is rapidly changing in our “breaking world,” one of always being aware to capitalize or respond to it. It is increasingly intensive and challenging. We need to adapt quicker than ever, be more agile and responsive and we require our learning events to reflect this as well.

I had recently written on one or two lightbulb moments for myself in my own learning journey, questioning how I can enable the flow of learning.

So working in the innovation space is no different.

We have those “moments of innovating need” and those needs to build rapidly but deeply those “domains of new innovation knowledge”

This requires the evolving power of learning platforms and clear guides to assist your individual learning pathway of innovation understanding need.  It does need this set of conversations and interactions. One’s that seeks out what needs to connect and evolve, to accelerate personal performance and contribute to the ‘needs’ of the challenge, growth or task at hand.

Our increasing connectivity, interactivity, and sharing are bringing about a fundamental change in all of what we do.

These shifts need accelerating our learning pathways but in very different ways than how we were taught in the past. I am busy attempting to connect my deep innovation domain content with my “blended” experiences in working in this space for over sixteen years, investigating, researching, applying and consulting on innovation solutions and currently seeking different ways to apply these through coaching, mentoring, facilitating and advising on innovation understanding, at the personal and team level and that needs to be increasingly digital and “bite (and byte) sized”

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The post Learning Platforms and Personal Learning Pathways first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.