Foster Performance - Building Your Innovation Intelligence

Are you engaging with all the different voices around you?

Having different perspectives and voices will enhance your innovation activities, they provide diversity, stimulus and greater options for you to consider the future innovation journey.

How do we set about engaging with all these different voices surrounding innovation?

Have you ever worked with the three horizon framework?
It is really useful for managing your innovation activities, drawing out the often conflicting voices within the organization on how to take innovation forward. The approach can unlock you from just being caught in the present, to one of envisaging a future that then allows you to begin to build different capabilities, competencies and capacities.

Find out more here and here and here on the three horizons or within this blog site put “three horizon approach ” into the search box. You will find I have provided a considerable overview in different posts’ thoughts on the 3H thinking and why I place such value in it for innovation’s evolution.
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We need the engagement platform for translating big data learning

Big Data is knocking very loudly on our door, how are you going to let it in and manage it?

How can we liberate that creative energy we have within our organizations, how can we achieve higher engagement?

How can we learn, share and transform the knowledge that is all around us, simply flooding in? How can we translate the data flowing in with the knowledge insights and innovation outcomes expected? How are we going to unleash the creativity that goes with new knowledge?

We need to actively encourage connected minds for value-creating opportunities and knowledge sharing for innovation to flow right across the organization. All the raw data needs connected and engaged minds.

“For this, we need to think about installing a modern engagement platform that has the knowledge and learning as its beating heart”

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Is all investment about the future?

I was reading an article by Doug Collins on the “three wishes for the innovation practitioner for 2015” where he points out “2014 was the year for share buybacks and dividends“.

An article from Bloomberg reports that companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index are “poised to spend $914 billion on share buybacks and dividends this year, or about 95 percent of earnings.”
95% of earnings – Doug rightly says “wow” and offers a thoughtful set of observations

“Every organization that enjoys free cash flow makes a decision on where to allocate that resource. If the opportunity available to the organization meets or exceeds the hurdle rate—the desired, expected rate of return—then, in theory, they invest in that opportunity. If not, then no: the organization returns the cash to the investors. Of course, earnings come after investments the organization makes in innovation—research & development expenses, for example. Many do invest a lot in R&D”

He then remarks “And yet…..and yet” ….
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Tackling the internal Jobs-to-be-done for improving Innovation

We are constantly nudged toward understanding the needs of customers through the jobs to be done approach to shaping our innovative solutions. So why do we still seem to not achieve this ‘higher purpose’ of providing solutions to customers’ needs?

Predictable growth has run its course as we live in unpredictable times; we need a better way to identify ALL those unmet needs that our customers have.

That need comes from knowing the “job which needs to be done”. We need to sharp shoot to hit clear targets, we need to become a lot more explicit in our knowledge of a customer’s unmet needs, and they need to make the connection of that need with our product (or service).

Mapping the hierarchy of customer needs

We need to map the jobs and generate desired outcome statements that are specific and of real interest to the customer, not our list of multiple ideas generated based on where we are or what we think we know. We need to build a hierarchy of customer needs.

By even attempting to follow a ‘needs first’ approach we are often left to figure out the unmet needs. The flaw lies in not having these fully understood. All needs can be captured but this requires combining a more rigorous, controlled approach, coupled with astute observations.

The key still requires us to accurately quantify the degree to which a proposed solution will increase customer satisfaction – and that means knowing the jobs they want to complete.

We need to segment by jobs and to do this we need to capture this in clear, precise job outcome given statements. We need to become clearer on the product, service or business model ‘job’ it is intended to perform, measured by a customer’s desired outcome.

I really believe our internal processes are letting us down.
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The Need to Automate the Innovation Process

There has always been a consistent call to automate the innovation process.

Now it might turn into a stampede, based on real ‘digital’ need.

We have made solid progress in the use of out-of-the box software for capturing ideas at the ‘fuzzy front end.’

We have developed pipelines and use product life cycle software systems to manage this through to commercialisation.

Yet today we still have a fragmented, often broken innovation process, very reliant on the manual processes, where the human intervention dominates.

Can this be changed? Technology must form a greater core of the innovation process.
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The need to respond quickly to new business objectives

The business objectives will change as we invest heavily in digital technologies, as we increasingly recognize and embrace this changing world where digital knowledge and insights begin to challenge and change our existing frameworks of innovation thinking.

Part five of a seven-part series

The outcomes of the investment are expected to provide clear returns and these might include but are not limited to:

1) different customization of services 2) quicker response to market trends in new offerings 3) identifying real-time cost optimizations, 4) concentrating on faster, more accurate decision-making to give new competitive edges 5) better and more holistic R&D 6) automating even further the supply chain management, 7) alter your approach channels to market, 8) move your business into new adjacencies or even white spaces and finally 9) design new business models and value propositions.

There will be lots of new moving parts to grapple with to be future innovation agile.
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IT is Struggling to be the Digital Technology Master

There is so much occurring in new applications and alternative solutions, it is a very tough position for most dealing in technology to truly master all of these breaking options they might have to consider.

It must be a little overwhelming when many responsible for IT have for years not had any strategic involvement and not been given clear line-of-business oversight.

Business management equally has over the years built up an ‘arm’s distance’ to IT and found ways to overcome barriers they felt were seemingly put in their way when it came to ‘bringing in’ the technology they deemed as essential.

Something needs to change going forward. Both the business manager and the IT need to find ways to exchange, collaborate and share. It is in their ‘vested’ interest but more importantly for the future health of the business itself.
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Is the balance in innovation activity about to change?

Is the digital technology we see emerging today going to be able to provide the positive tension between rational and randomness that takes place in our innovation activities today?

Will digital begin to dominate our innovative thinking, will we lose this randomness, this spark of human creativity or will it be allowing this to connect multiple strands in new, more exciting ways? How are we going to adjust to the changing way technology will impose itself on our innovation activities and needs?

How will all this Mobile Connectivity, Cloud Computing, Social Media, Crowdsourcing, Internet of Things, Industrial Internet, Big Data, Analytics, 3D Printing and Scanning be presented and managed as a part of successful business scenarios and intertwined with changes in social behaviour?

Are our existing innovation systems ready for this potentially set of sweeping changes in knowledge inflows and translation, so they can be successfully commercialized into new innovation?

Part two within the series of seven
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As new digital technology dawns for innovation

Digital Technology is significantly challenging for organizations to re-think and re-equip due to the emergence of big data, smart mobile connectivity, social media, cloud, analytics and the growing commercialization.

These are all driving external technology change, all clearly pointing towards a significant disruption of the existing ways we conduct business internally. So we need to ask “how are we going to take advantage of the potential business transformation?”

The issue is how to capitalize and create the value from all this change for innovation and performance enhancement?

***This is the first of a seven-part exploratory ‘open thinking’ about digital technology and its potential impact on innovation as we know it today. These will be published daily over the next week. The intent at this stage is more about raising our thinking on what might need changing or at least re-orientation within our innovation management approaches.***

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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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