Fresh thinking - Building Your Innovation Intelligence

Risk Is Understanding Your Scope of Reach Should Exceed Your Grasp.

We were not born as risk-takers but we can develop it through our own growing self-actualization, creativity, a pursuit for growth and enjoying that feeling of being stretched, going beyond your normal scope of reach.

Well some of us do, but sadly most tend to become risk-avoiding because of the environment they are in or have been associated with for long periods, where avoidance rubs off, it seeps into the soul.

Many enjoy being simply ‘passive’, avoiding anything that smacks of being ‘proactive’; it is safer to be ‘reactive’. Innovation and heaven can equally wait.

Putting it simply most people and organizations are just afraid to take risks and this fear takes over and drives their choices. Innovation is certainly something that suffers from this fear of risk.

Organizations miss critical opportunities, individuals fail to speak out and argue for a given change or innovative idea. We can simply stop growing, to want to become something more, we take the easy option, we avoid risk.
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Place Your Future Bets – Invest In Innovation Capital

Recognizing the value of our innovation-related assets is where the smart money should go, and then we need to invest in innovation capital. To gain growth and improve productivity is through innovation. We need to translate knowledge into new values.

When you pause and consider the make-up of Innovation Capital you realize it makes such an economic contribution and in a report from McKinsey & Co, they have set about identifying this to produce the above summary, covering 16 countries, to understand the real value of this Innovation Capital.

These numbers are big and still don’t fully capture everything associated with innovation as much remains ‘hidden’ or ‘attached’ to other activities as well.
We need to shift our thinking on what makes up Innovation Capital
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Exploring Diffusion and Adoption for Innovation – Part 3

The future within our engagements will determine diffusion and adoption- part three

One of my favorite books is “Dealing with Darwin– how great companies innovate at every phase of their evolution” written by Geoffrey Moore. It is well worth a read.

When you work through his other books and connect thinking of “Crossing the Chasm” and “Inside the Tornado” you really appreciate the learning stories coming out of Roger Moore’s studies of the Technology Adoption Life-Cycle.

We all need to rethink a lot as the new challenges come rushing towards us.

In his work, Geoffrey Moore talks about ‘traction’ and I think this is a great word for thinking about how to gain diffusion and adoption in product, service or business models, to gain market and customer acceptance.
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Exploring Diffusion and Adoption for Innovation – Part 1

The future within our engagements will determine diffusion and adoption- part one.

According to Professor Clayton Christensen and drawn from his book “Seeing What’s Next: Using the Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change”, by Clayton M. Christensen, Scott D. Anthony, and Erik A. Roth published by Harvard Business School Press, the only way to look into the future is to use theories.

“The best way to make accurate sense of the present, and the best way to look into the future, is through the lens of theory.” The theory of innovation helps to understand the forces that shape the context and influence natural decisions.

This might not be fashionable for many because as soon as you introduce “theory” into the discussion for many of my practical colleagues they want to dismiss it.

Going back to Christensen “good theory provides a robust way to understand important developments, even when the data is limited. “Theory helps to block out the noise and to amplify the signal”.

Diffusion of Innovation Theory is important for our innovation understanding
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The Ability to Move Innovation from the Existing to the Preferred

One of those defining extracts I came across many years back, as it is one that has shaped much of where I believe innovation needed to go, let alone where I believe it still does.

It is a pathway I want to continue to travel along and will constantly try to encourage others to equally take the walk.

I was working through a set of presentation files today and came across this extract again and thought I must share this. It rings true as much as it did those years back.

“Strategy is useless without innovation; innovation is directionless without strategy”.
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Traversing across into horizon 2 for new breaking innovations

Within our ‘business as usual’ attitudes lie the seeds of destruction. Today there is a relentless pace; we are facing stagnation in many maturing markets.

We place a disproportionately high amount of our resources in the ‘here and now’ to defend what we have and what we know. A potential ‘big mistake’
We actually subvert the future to prolong the life of the existing.

We constantly look to make it more efficient and more effective but this is in the majority of cases just incremental in what we do, both in innovation and our activities. These are often simply propping up the past success instead of shifting the resources into the investments of the future.

Spotting signs of innovating decay

Within the Three Horizon framework for innovation the horizon two is beginning to address some of the current decay arising from the core within the existing activities (or system). Here we have the highest tension point as it is the place for transformation to take shape and form.
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Make Virtual Room In Your Innovation Pipeline

So what are you doing this Friday, June 6th 2014 to help in your innovation pipeline thinking?

Fancy joining me and up to 2,000 others that are expected for an Innovation virtual conference.

One that has been constructed around an agenda, made up of a seemingly good mix of practitioners, a key-note or two and product development experts working through the end-to-end product development process, or selected bits of it, in a one-day event.

Crossing over the crossroads of conferences
Innovation conferences are for me at least, at a crossroads. I find many jaded, struggling to justify the costs and commitment of time we need to put in to participate, often in one way dialogues.
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We are not facing up to the big Societal challenges of today?

Perhaps why innovation feels somewhat flat (well for me) is our organizations and societies are utterly failing to allow us all to step up in innovation to tackle those huge societal issues, those massive, growing problems that are swirling all around us.

We need to shake out of our lethargy and really begin to attempt to solve the real issues of our time. Some organizations are clearly working on and trying to draw attention and gain greater engagement but we need a much greater concerted effort to focus on the big societal challenges.

Global warming, rising health issues, finally cracking cancer, malaria, dementia, finding different solutions to the ageing within society. How are we going to tackle the rapidly depleting natural resources, the future conflicts over water, food, or energy . These are big, hairy, audacious gaps to be resolved.

Many are avoiding the need too stare hard into the future as we are not re-equipping everyone with skills that combine inventiveness, innovation and creativity that contributes into their communities, we have got stuck in the “me”. A reality of depletion is racing towards us and it is not a pretty sight. Continue reading “We are not facing up to the big Societal challenges of today?”

Gaining idea engagement can be a five step process.

I have been recently revisiting Everett Roger’s work on diffusion and adoptions recently for providing us with a better place for engagement in innovation approaches.

I’ve been evaluating if it has the same relevance in my mind in our more connected world, where speed, knowledge and exchanges are measured in microseconds.

This reminded me of a suggestion I made some time back and I thought I’d ‘air’ this again for engaging with others.

We constantly fall into the trap of not providing our listeners enough of a reason to ‘buy into’ our thoughts. We forget to either pitch it to their mental framework or we do not provide a set of compelling arguments that allows our idea a mutual recognition of its value or structure, to take it forward and transform it into something tangible and valuable.

I think using Rogers’s rate of diffusion principles you can end up offering a fairly powerful positioning statement. Continue reading “Gaining idea engagement can be a five step process.”

Organizations are in a constant dilemma of the innovation fit.

The issue of “where does innovation fit?” is one of the most difficult ones to address in many organizations. It seems to fit uncomfortably for many.

At the top of our organizations they ‘require’ innovation but will often not want the potential disruption this might entail.

Yet the organization today is being challenged like never before, it has gone from managing the predictable business to responding to the unpredictable, more opportunistic and alert to change, a place innovation can fit within the need to respond to this different environment.

This is the final post in the series that has focused on the innovation work mat components
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