Category: Foster Performance

The rugged final frontier of innovation – Execution.

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. Continue reading “The rugged final frontier of innovation – Execution.”

What makes innovation sticky?

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.
Continue reading “What makes innovation sticky?”

What are the new paradigms in 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.
Continue reading “What are the new paradigms in innovation?”

There are two distinct parts to any Innovation Funnel

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!
Continue reading “There are two distinct parts to any Innovation Funnel”

The Navigation of the Three Horizon Framework- An Emerging Guide.

I have planned to explore in three simultaneous blogs, a trilogy of blogs, the three horizon model more extensively. It is a most valuable one to build into your thinking about strategy and innovation.
This is the final blog of the trilogy on the Three Horizon Framework and offers my thinking on an emerging framing to help in navigating through this.
The need is to define your different horizons.
Continue reading “The Navigation of the Three Horizon Framework- An Emerging Guide.”

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

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.
Continue reading “Economic growth is an outcome of the innovation trajectory we set.”

The dual forces within our cultural thinking

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
Continue reading “The dual forces within our cultural thinking”

Can innovation lead us to economic recovery?

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.
Continue reading “Can innovation lead us to economic recovery?”

Learning to absorb new knowledge for innovation

In a blog I wrote in November last year entitled “Moving-towards-a-more-distributed-innovation-model”( http://bit.ly/b38ixv)  I outlined some thoughts on the flow of knowledge in a distributed innovation model and discussed the Absorptive Capacities more from an internal organizational perspective.

Increasingly we are looking outside for new knowledge that needs internally managing.

As organizations seek increasingly outside their own walls, the appreciation of how they are managing knowledge, learning and interpreting this is becoming a critical aspect of open innovation to be successful.

There is a growing need to absorb, integrate and apply this in new and novel ways for accelerating innovation performance.

The more we seek, the more the knowledge increases in complexity as markets are rapidly changing. The more we are relying on knowledge flowing into the organization the more we have to strengthen our inter-dependence and collaboration efforts to extract the knowledge we are acquiring for it potential value.

Are organizations recognizing the value of structuring their knowledge flows? Do they have the right learning mechanisms to accelerate and exploit new potentials from this knowledge?

Organizations tend to be set up for incremental learning.
Continue reading “Learning to absorb new knowledge for innovation”

The importance of managing our intangible capital is the key for today’s innovating business.

Today, we are valuing organizations in completely different ways than some years back as intangible capital grows in importance. In the past we were valuing organizations purely on their tangible assets, the ‘hard’ (easier to) quantify assets, shown on the balance sheets as the basis for the value of the organization.

Today that is not the case; it is more the off-balance-sheet bound up in networks, relationships, connections and the ability to manage the fluidity that is occurring constantly around us, and the organization’s ability to respond appropriately in seeking out improved, new value through better innovative offerings.

Intangibles are providing the new value system equation to focus upon
Continue reading “The importance of managing our intangible capital is the key for today’s innovating business.”