The Nine Stages that are 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 into the longer-term. Those that can be continually ‘orchestrated’ and constantly adapted to meet the strategic need. Continue reading “Understanding your innovation capabilities to make them more dynamic”
How can we map a new pathway for shifting current practices so as to transform them?
How can we bring increasing agility into our innovation work, that requires both stable and dynamic moments to deliver better outcomes?
Where do we focus, what do we recognize as organization practices, that can begin to transform the organization and re-equip it for a different future?
Agility for me is vital, it allows us to increasingly be adaptive in an uncertain world.
As innovation continues to be central to growth far more in the future it is our ability to adapt and adjust to all the uncertainties and this requires the ability to be agile.
Innovation often fails to align with the strategic needs. This is often not the fault of the innovator happily working away with no specific guidelines, apart from the general remit of “we need to be more innovative”, it lies in the boardroom not communicating the board’s needs clearly enough down the organization.
Building up our capacity to innovation does need to understand and reflect the organization’s business activities but it is grasping the value creation aspects that will deliver the necessary capital-efficient and profitable growth.
Even the basic questions often remain unclear, those of are we looking to grow revenue, reduce costs, reduce working capital or improve our fixed capital? I expect the CFO would say “all of them” but each does have implications on the understanding of the fit and eventual role of innovation. Then where does risk fit into the strategic equation for innovation, it lacks often the clarity it needs.
Deciding that capabilities can be better leveraged requires a separation of exploit and explore.
The aligning of strategic direction (and importance) with any capability needs is in the understanding of what activities are diverging with core and those converging, then figuring out the future core. It is the two dynamics of exploitation and exploration we should be leveraging for our innovation and future growth
Today we need to exploit and explore and our capabilities need to be built fit for one of these two purposes. Exploiting is today’s business need, to leverage and improve the existing business and equally, in parallel, explore for tomorrow’s new business growth.
Then we also need to diverge and converge
The diverging ones need to have a real emphasis on improving performance, how they are managed for cash or to eventually sell or dispose of along with those converging on the new ‘known’ core of the business to grow and expand. So by recognizing these and that is not easy in itself, you are beginning to know and identify the capabilities you need to have in place to fix today and make it as healthy as possible, alongside those new capabilities that will create a new winning set of growth and value propositions.
We certainly need bolder investments in knowledge around the make-up of innovation capabilities
I certainly believe there is a real call for fresh and bolder investments in knowledge, in infrastructure that focuses on activities that spur new approaches that lead to innovation. These are not just the traditional ones based on managing today’s core but on finding those innovations that provide new value, the new generation activity that is occurring from recognizing how we can build, yes build for further exploitation (extending the life) and exploration (new understanding) and manage each as separate risk evaluation exercises with different metrics of progress.
We also need a deeper innovation grounding of internal workings and alignment
What I feel we need is a deeper grounding in what is actually going on inside organizations within their innovation activities and how these align with the needs of strategy and what is clearly missing. We start here as it gives us all this clarity and coherence, missing in much of our existing understanding.
We have the real opportunity today, in finding new ways of combining the four emerging forces of knowledge, technology, entrepreneurship, and innovation, which will drive the growth models of tomorrow. It is these that are forming the new innovations ‘black box.’
It is mastering this new ‘black box’ of actual innovation activities, exploring and exploiting the necessary innovation capabilities that are required to be ‘going on’ in organizations to achieve a closer coherence we need to radically improve the innovation performance.
I have plenty of ideas, frames and methods built up to help you make innovation fit and be more coherent in its contribution. Why not find out?
A firm’s ordinary capabilities are the ones that enable us to perform efficiently and effectively, those essential routines and practices that often require having a high level of technical need supporting these activities.
In contrast, dynamic capabilities are those higher level competencies that determine a firm’s ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure both the resources and competencies to possibly shape, have the power to transform and then be deployed to meet rapidly changing business environments to take advantage of these changing conditions.
Recognizing the importance of Dynamic Capabilities
Dynamic capabilities are about selecting the right things to do and getting them done, while ordinary capabilities are about doing things right. The former implicates dynamic efficiency, the latter static efficiency.
Reduce the tension in the layers or structures for innovation to emerge.
A really hard part of managing in larger organizations is in managing the layers and competing forces. Hierarchy dominates the speed of what we do.
The tensions surrounding innovation
Often we forget to reinforce the very design within our organizational structures, we leave role structures incomplete and uncertain and we set the deliverables in often ‘woolly’ ways so we can side step the often intransigence within our organizations way of working . This just further promotes uncertainly and it is not an adaptive organization but one left open so the leadership can side step when it suites their purpose.
In leaving this so open to ignoring one minute, using it as the ‘whipping boy’ the next they slowly immobilize those underneath. These create unnatural built-in tensions and often create a shearing effect.
They grind against each other, like tectonic plates that force further disruption and upheaval.
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.
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 applythe 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.
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. Continue reading “Do you REALLY want to know how to innovate?”
There was a report written back in 2013 entitled and under, “The New Normal: Competitive advantage in the digital economy” written for the Big Innovation Centre, an initiative of The Work Foundation and Lancaster University that I would recommend your time to read.
I often go back to this as it provides a real source of understanding of the shifts being undertaken within our organizations, to make the fundamental shifts in their thinking to understand where today’s and our future value creation will come from; something that is mostly due to this increasing importance of the digital changes occurring all around us.
I clearly believe we do need to understand the strategic importance of the make-up of our innovation capital, yet presently nearly all our corporate boards lack any clear line of sight into this. Why?
Not understanding what makes up the capital is holding innovation back. We are actually constraining growth through this lack of understanding as it makes us all cautious of the future.
If we don’t fully understand the make-up of all our capital should we invest or divert resources to delivering on it? I think it is high time we did.
So what makes up our innovation capital and why is it important to know?
Should we care, does it matter? I would argue it does, increasingly so. Within the innovation capital lies the future of the organization and holds one of the real golden keys to the sustaining performance of the company, or not.
The Nine Stages that are 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.
