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.

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.

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

• Recognizing 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
• Recognizing resources can come beyond the firm and then bringing these in successfully, in gradual steps. Managing within a more open environment.
• Achieving  mutual dependencies to support; recognizing 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

• Recognizing 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 modeling 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 road blocks – 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 recognizing the 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
• Recognizing the value of hidden innovation and spotting its occurrence

7. Entering into Competitive Battle – the Dynamics of Rivalry, the Uniqueness of You

• Recognizing, developing, capturing, transforming, avoiding and outmaneuvering
• 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 organizational learning, in measured steps
• Recognizing the role of leadership, achieving strategic alignment and working on broadening out innovation competence at different organizational 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 fitness landscape

The post Understanding your innovation capabilities to make them more dynamic first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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.

A report provided by McKinsey “How to create an agile organization” has been part of a broader ‘agile’ series from them but this one specifically gave me my necessary anchor point, to move forward with my own design thinking for agility and innovation.

McKinsey does point out in this report you do need all eighteen practices to be fully alert to agile, but it is these dynamic ones that hold the real promise in my mind. These are the ones we all should move towards as our projected aim to achieve.

So let me summarize these nine dynamic practices

I have taken the nine dynamic practices outline meaning from this McKinsey report and added my own thoughts and reflections within these summaries.

1. Information Transparency

Today we need to take away all the filtering going on in organizations. Those who fill positions to control and attempt to influence the data. If we can’t unlock the knowledge within the organization, we fail to connect the people working within the organization to its products and related customer needs. Transparency makes the sharing of the knowledge increasingly relevant to connecting up the ‘whole’. There needs to be a very powerful concept of un-filtering, to allow the flow of understanding. It is highly dynamic and powerful in all it can release if encouraged and supported.

2. Rapid iteration and experimentation

The whole emphasis today is on rapid and fast cycles of learning. That testing, learning and adjusting from mistakes and building on these become really valuable progress points. Prototyping is getting so much better, it is creeping into the everyday culture when we innovate, or should. The MVP concept is so right to get features that are potentially better, out there, to test and learn from.

3. Continuous Learning

The moment we stop personally learning, we are the real losers. We need to find ways to ”cut out time” to explore and look for new ways to learn to improve ourselves and what we do within organizations. We need to push for new ways of working and to learn ‘more freely’ from other’s knowledge, in open exchanges and ways to collaborate. We progress by learning from failures and relating to them.

4. Flexible resource allocation.

We need to be adaptive, fluid in any organization and team design. The ability to feel in a position to ‘ramp up or shut down’ initiatives empowers us. We need to want to constantly change teams, seek out joining new ventures. To be always wanting to be redeployed, not because we are hanging on but because any new deployment means new horizons and opportunities. Seek change out, embrace this flexible world and show you are a key resource to help mold and shape it.

5. Open physical and virtual environment.

I often struggle with open planned offices, they provide an environment that distracts and not promote. If you can achieve a way that people communicate and collaborate with each other then great but when you are in a globally dispersed organization it is how you openly ‘react’ in your daily work. For me the virtual environment holds the real future and with so many organizations denying social tools the key to make it ‘purposefully designed’ is to make the activities clearly visible to all that need to know, to constantly show where your intervention and impact has made a difference in building context, content, structure or sharing knowledge. We need to find much better ways to make this a really dynamic, exciting, and rewarding part of agility within organizations

6. Sensing and seizing opportunities.

The value of being proactive, to watch out for signals, to then act upon them, to make your insights valuable to change perceptions, to alter customer bias, to engage with the external environment to shape, influence and contribute into new initiatives makes ‘sensing and seizing’ so important to drive innovation as the catalyst of change.

7. Technology, systems, and tools.

The constant demands being placed on us, to learn and adapt to new technology, systems, and tools as it keeps changing is mega-hard to keep pace with. New organization design in architecture, infrastructure, practices, and ways is tough to integrate the old and the new. How we respond to these is highly dependent on the articulated needs of the business. We can only be ‘responsive’ if we relate to the changing needs. The ability to have a more modular architecture, updates coming in a shorter interval of times can help in a continued updating. It is when the process determines rigid design you can’t change. To ‘react and respond’ you need to keep looking at moving towards technology frontiers. Exploring and exploiting contributes to a better holistic desired business outcome.

8. Role mobility

The movement needs to be constant. When we design we need to always account for achieving a certain fluidity. We need to constantly match our present skills with organizational needs. As we develop a more open talent marketplace we need to have this increasing mobility. Communicating roles, tasks and project outlines need to be demanded, then we have the understanding to change and then deliver to these ‘askes’ of us. These need to constantly match with our own goals, the alignment is the enabler to make this happen.

9. Active partnerships and ecosystems.

Relationships are our trading value. As we build out networks we need to trade. We trade in knowledge, in contribution, in working alongside others to co-develop. We seek out partnering, to invest our intellectual capital with theirs. We look to build the organization’s ecosystem through these engagements, to contribute to new products, services and solutions to look to bring them always to fruition. Our ‘need’ for activity and engagement builds a thriving, more dynamic environment.

In summary.

If we can embrace change by seeking out ways to re-equip ourselves, we encourage our organization to become more dynamic by these actions. We do get stuck in a certain mindset and set of behaviors. We become beholden to them, they eventually ‘freeze’ our progress, we stop learning and experimenting. We need to push for formal mechanisms of change, we need to seek out our own. We need to take hold of our actions, be clear on our organization’s vision and how we believe we can contribute.

As individuals, as members of fluid teams and as an organization we need to be mutually reinforcing. For me, fluidity is equally the growing need of organization’s today.  It is in recognizing that the dynamic practices found for building agility into ourselves and the organization do lie in these nine practices, they give us this level of fluidity. Take them on board, practice them constantly and over time your agility becomes your transformation. It becomes the ‘norm’ and allows for constant adaption.

The post Achieving agility within your innovation work first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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?

The post Moving towards Innovations Capability Coherence first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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.

Dynamic capabilities require an organizational form that leverages the knowledge and capabilities of managers throughout the organization. In business firms with strong dynamic capabilities, the key tasks of managers, especially those in the top management team, are entrepreneurial. It’s not just a planning role; it’s also strategic. It involves planning along with engagement and enactment, it encourages agility.

Appreciating and leveraging those ordinary capabilities is equally essential

The stronger these ordinary capabilities can be ‘honed’ then organizations can go beyond performing basic business functions well and can excel in these. While most capabilities, including some dynamic capabilities, are underpinned by organizational routines, many of the activities of top managers are non-routine by nature.

The key entrepreneurial capabilities needed for asset orchestration and realignment of the enterprise often reside in the skills and knowledge of top managers, managing the routines and assets and respond dynamically when changes are happening to adapt and respond

Ordinary capabilities involve operations, administration, and managing the governance. They are rooted more firmly in routines that are dynamic capabilities. A routine is a repeated action sequence, which may have its roots in algorithms and heuristics about how the enterprise is to get things done. Organizational routines transcend the individuals involved.

Finding the right complementary blend of capabilities is a real challenge to achieve

The capabilities perspective views the enterprise as clusters of complementary assets that must be combined and coordinated to create value. The utilization of such assets, therefore, requires managerial action. Managers in the dynamic capabilities framework perform that role. They orchestrate and call into being, the assets that are vital to firm performance.

They determine the speed at which and the degree to which, the firm’s particular resources can be aligned and realigned to match the requirements and opportunities of the business environment in order to generate sustained positive returns.

The alignment of resources both inside and outside the firm includes assessing when and how the enterprise ought to form alliances and joint ventures with other organizations.

Understanding all your required capabilities needed is essential

Valuing and knowing both your ordinary repeatable capabilities, to enhance and improve existing performance and discovering those that are more dynamic in nature, to change performance more significantly are both critical to identify, build and support in both consistent and thoughtful ways. The key is knowing what is critical and then how to focus and invest in those that drive and sustain performance.

Investing in a mapping of your innovation fitness landscape can significantly contribute to this understanding and advance organizational performance in the critical areas that offer it present and future value.

Extracts have been drawn from the paper and built upon: “The Functions of Middle and Top Management in the Dynamic Capabilities Framework” by Sunyoung Lee and David J. Teece

The post Recognizing the different capabilities to develop and grow first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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.

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.

They ‘freeze out’ creativity unless it ‘arrives’ from the top of the organization. Eventually the organization dies as it is not generating new forms of creativity from within, this has been hollowed out by this imposing from the top.

Organization design needs to change. We need to ensure creative knowledge flows up and down organizations. We need to change our thinking from layers into a network of connected parts that we keep small, flat and focused but constantly aware their existence is dependent on others outside their mini ecosystem. Today these different layers actually require several levels of reconfiguration designed into the organization. We add layers onto our layers and each time we are constraining the organizations or the individuals to explore, they stay ‘trapped’ within their space.

Imposing the killer effect of time just because of a financial calendar is stupid – it hurts innovation significantly

Just look at how organizations impose time on us. One really critical one to address and to ‘kill off,’ is the pressure of time. Imposing time as a condition for innovation can be a real killer. Time horizons to achieve different tasks often cannot be ‘legislated’ or ‘dictated’ but sadly they are forced on reluctant innovators responsible for delivery of new concepts.

We need to re-establish the difference between goals – within a certain period covered (one year), objectives – attained later but are progressed within the period and finally ideals– those unattainable but clearly possible concepts, that progress at slower rates and go well beyond normal goals. Innovation works within this environment, actually it will thrive.

Not just the incremental, but the radical, disruptive and breakthrough innovation craved for by the top management, can finally have a ‘decent’ time horizon to be managed through. Planning needs to account for all three horizons and managing across these needs different mindsets, irrespective of the industry you are in, it does not matter if you are building planes or developing food products. Managing innovation across the three horizon methodology helps reduce tensions, design innovations that can be more radical or breakthrough.

Tacking the incompatibles to ease the tensions

We really should stop pretending that innovation is not so hard and actually state it is often incompatible to much of what we perform on a daily basis. The task of managing intangibles (unknowns) alongside the tangibles (known) needs greater appreciation of their complexities, and the difficulties of balancing the two for achieving  a ‘decent’ result.

Leadership, I believe, would need to understand innovation far more in this demanding environment of inquiry. No wonder it is often ducked and just vaguely talked about as much of innovation understanding is still poorly understood in its impacts and effect. We do need to address this lack of serious innovation management within our organizations.

Reducing activities and replacing these with outcome orientation

Innovation is no different from what we expect from efficiency or effectiveness; we want to see the outcomes.  Outcome orientation holds a precious key to think about far more.  We have struggled on many occasions to clearly establish the really good metrics for judging innovation. They seem to get lost within organizations. Part of the innovation activities has been assigned to some other cost centre, or the capacity was already established and we often don’t break these down and assign these clearly enough to the different activities, we should, but into outcome orientation ones. Were the activities contributing to efficiency or innovation? We judge these through effectiveness of the outcome.

We need to balance existing performance engines for repeatable everyday tasks with innovation delivery engines for new activities to make our organizations function more effectively. Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble have offered some thoughts on this at the implementation stage, although these still need more examination and exploration.

Also Scott Anthony has pointed out in his article “Negotiating Innovation and Control’ on the different ways to balance tension there is one, in my opinion, that needs deeper investigation and development and that is the ‘ambidextrous’ one. This makes distinctions but links the parts of the whole organization by developing competing frames, not competing forces. Roger Martin suggests in one of his books “The Opposable Mind” that we need to develop “integrative thinking” as part of this need to change.

Innovation should be alongside as a equal partner to efficiency. It becomes efficient innovation and core to what you do and how you operate

Seeking constant efficiencies is actually slowing down our organizations. We need to do the opposite, to speed them up and capitalize on finding innovation opportunities quickly and then knowing how to scale them equally fast. We need to do this by developing the competencies and understandings of experimentation, piloting, prototyping in fast, discreet and measured ways

The worrying thing is any dynamics within the system are dominated by the slow components, and the rapid components simply have to follow along.

“Slow constrains quick, slow controls quick”.

The only way to ensure a speeding up is to be coherent on the purpose, clarify the bounds and governing principles that need to be enacted and evolve the organization design away from layers and hierarchy. We need to build up a series of inner networks that depend on each other but constantly reach out to connect, share and exchange but more within a organizational design that is flat but highly responsive and inter dependent to work well. This needs orchestration not hierarchy in its managing.

Simply by consciously working on all the dysfunction points within an organization will certainly reduce the tensions, reduce the ‘shearing effects’ and allow the organization in all its layers to ‘react’ and be allowed to come back into a balance, where innovation sits equally alongside efficiency, especially if both focus on outcome orientation and that certainly is not the current business way we often see today.

The post Innovation tension lies in our layers and structures first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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.

Legacy can choke an organization in so many ways to limit expansion. 

How can we break out of this and rethink? When we begin to investigate legacy to cut loose and design differently, it begins to infringe, it challenges, it simply attacks what has taken often years to build and those most involved become defensive and fit to hang onto what has been established, as it feels familiar.

It feels like ‘their’ legacy is being destroyed and what they have fought hard to gain now needs protecting. Most organizations never feel fully capable to address legacy, they even will deliberately design duplication into their operating model, they will recognize they are far from optimal and more often than not, live with the consequences. In today’s world, this is a real mistake.

The world is changing

You can’t afford to keep heads buried in the sand like an ostrich, although that’s actually a myth stating when ostriches are faced with an attack by predators they bury their heads. New global adversaries are altering our landscape and forcing us to become increasingly competitive, forcing us to often reluctantly alter our established ways.

We can’t afford not to refresh and renew on a constant basis. We need to not just adapt, become more agile but we must think through what, where and how we manage. We need to build a more dispersed network of innovation connections within and outside our organizations to gather and synthesize knowledge that has potential value and future worth.

To allow this to happen, for knowledge to flow into, within and across organizations we need to strip away many of the constraints built into our structure that are designed to ‘contain’ knowledge, whereas today we have to ‘spread’ knowledge far and wide, so we can make the new connections to build int this existing knowledge the  new value points where innovation resides.

Today we have solutions to make a real change and address those legacy systems.

Today we have a solution, we can migrate our current systems into the cloud, breaking them up and building some unique APIs that can ease the transition to cloud services by decoupling critical parts of a company’s cumbersome legacy infrastructure.. These become microservice architecture, providing modular and improved flexibility with the aim of decreasing time to market for example. Or building a suite of small services that allow more external people to contribute, a greater agility in response and build greater independence but can still be internally managed.

So we break down some of those legacy systems into vital chunks that can benefit from external partnering, so as to speed up innovation-to-market. These are driven far more by the business perspective not the technology aspect alone. You are looking to find increased business value by breaking out of some of your legacy problems.

Any journey starts with ‘letting go’

Control gives comfort; we constantly design this into the system. The larger we are, the greater the controls built into the system it seems but somehow, controlling for control sake, does need replacing; we need to let go of more than we realize to reduce the constraints placed on our business. We need to replace ‘command and control’ built up over numerous years with something different. The cloud offers a way forward by finding points of value that can be broken out to accelerate innovation performance.

We need to begin to ask a range of strategic questions that question our legacy so we can be released to move forward.

The post Organizational legacy so often chokes innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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 apply the 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.

Through an innovation fitness landscape plan, you can access where you are and what needs to be achieved to get you to the desired point you see as where you need to be.

We call this “mapping the terrain of where you would like to be.” Your preferred place after you have accessed the competitive situation and what needs to differentiate yourselves, by being realistic about your present operational performance and a rigorous evaluation of how you can perform.

This is asking those searching questions around whether you have the commitment, resources, and determination to make a significant change in changing your capabilities or capacities to innovate. How are you both internally coping in an era of challenging technology change conditions but equally how you are seen to be externally coping with the pressures, rigors, and changes occurring in your marketplace.

You need to arrive at your preferred place after you have accessed the competitive situation and what needs to differentiate yourselves and being realistic about your present operational performance and a rigorous evaluation of how you can perform, whether you have the commitment, resources, and determination to make a significant change. How are you internally coping but equally how you are seen to be externally coping with the pressures, rigors, and changes occurring in your marketplace.

Arriving at a clear point of view

The intent is that we have to arrive at a clear “point of view” of both the reality of where you are and where you would like to be. These have to be explicit, to achieve a conscious awareness. I believe we have to go through some very specific and recognized steps, I outline the nine stages we need to work through the process here. These stages are a mixture of discussion, investigation and structured analysis and diagnostics.

This set of reality checks needs a clear, defining pathway in how the organization will need to change, a level of clarity of how you see your innovation capacity is not at the required level. Then we identify and describe the required outcomes of ‘fitness need’ of the structured work to be undertaken through the different parts of the Innovation Fitness Landscape assessment, establishing those capabilities you are likely to need, the more innovation dynamic capabilities. It is establishing these, that drive your innovation performance towards your stated needs and goals, ones to close the gap in present capabilities and required ones.

This moving from the present to the preferred requires this journey across the mapped terrain and the nature and character of that journey needs to be clarified, on what is needed from you and all the people involved to achieve your (transformation) goals. Those growing innovation dynamic capabilities become part of the enduring strategy that informs all those involved and mobilizes all that is needed to get you into this new innovation position.

The greater innovation fitness you achieve equates to more value creation potential you can generate.

These are the search for your dynamic points for innovation. These are unique to you, they make you distinctive. They lead you to new growth, new creations, new opportunities to innovate. You evolve. You constantly look to combine in different ways to stay ‘dynamic’ and sustaining. We are setting about building your innovation capital.

If you would like to learn more, then please contact me and we can set up a clarifying conversation to talk through this specifically, related to your unique position. Contact me at paul@agilityinnovation.com

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The post Peeling away the terrain of innovation reality first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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. We fail to ask the questions constantly of which parts have the greater impact to deliver innovation, which is not so important? Innovation is still not treated in any form as a company-wide need, to build the integrated innovation management system or practices, it often stands alone or in pockets of isolated understanding.

We do need to bring innovation increasingly into our core, not just in thinking but in all of what we do and think. It is this holistic way we can make fundamental changes to how we go about our business as recognition of the dependencies is poorly understood.

This is what needs to change and can you answer these questions?

Q: What and where do you place your resources to gain greater impact?

Q: What is important to recognize as needing additional ‘weight and focus’, what capability and competencies need to have a stronger emphasis and why? How can we identify these, make the innovation process more dynamic yet these embed constantly as routines? What would happen if we ignore certain innovation aspects, what would give greater impact to our business?

Q: How can we identify these, make the innovation process more dynamic yet these embed constantly as routines? What would happen if we ignore certain innovation aspects, what would give greater impact to our business?

Q: What would happen if we ignore certain innovation aspects, what would give greater impact to our business? What does it release in precious resources?

Why working towards an Innovation Fitness becomes important

 The pressing need for a firm is to integrate, build and reconfigure internal and external competencies/ capabilities to address rapidly changing environments and its ability to achieve new, more innovative forms in market position.

This calls for more ‘innovation dynamic capability” to be achieved.

Mapping out your innovation capabilities to the task at hand enables you to understand and relate to what is needed. Innovation Fitness Landscapes identify the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts- the appropriate resources to navigate the business terrain and explore and respond to the opportunities identified and deliver these into the market in a timely executed fashion.

The ability to identifying the emerging patterns provides the need to act and invest, you begin to make adaptive walks, you explore and exploit so as to move you to the higher fitness points where innovation viability is enhanced. To achieve this understanding demands an investment into this deepening of your innovation understanding. is needed to be in place

Greater innovation fitness building equates to more value creation potential. The ability to inter-couple landscape entities and exploit individual interactions alters your dynamics to innovate and improve repeatable cycle times and provides for increasing options to explore.

The ability to inter-couple landscape entities and exploit individual interactions alters your dynamics to innovate and improve repeatable cycle times and provides for increasing options to explore. You begin to build your sustaining capabilities and competencies to not just ‘apply’ to the jobs-on-hand but to the ones you see as offering a promising future.

As you grow in your confidence, you grow your options and in knowing your innovation dynamic capabilities you can leverage and expand your potential and business.

Knowing your innovation capabilities and competencies enables you to drive an increasing innovation agenda that capitalizes on this growing knowledge.

Talk to me on how you can go about this.

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The post Do you REALLY want to know how to innovate? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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.

Radical changes in the environment we are currently witnessing requires a more radical set of responses. The tangible sources of value creation are being replaced by our abilities to manage all the intangibility that is the source of our potential competitive advantage. It is found in constantly recombining the different sources of these intangibles, turning them into dynamic capabilities. It is the synergistic effects from harnessing these different sources collectively and constantly exploring and exploiting them.

This report is suggesting that the real sources of value creation and competitive advantage in the digital economy lie in fluidity and constantly evolving the intangibles. We still are failing to come to grips with this, to understand its force and position in today’s thinking. Technology or digitization has been such an underlying catalyst to this shift going on.

They see through their research, that the increasing digitization of economic activities has improved the detailed measurement of business activities (which aids better strategy formulation and positioning), enabled faster and cheaper experimentation (which fosters organizational ambidexterity and increases the likelihood of spawning innovations), facilitated the easier sharing of observations and ideas (which allows for the capturing of insights and learning from network members), and increased the ability to replicate innovations more quickly (which improves transaction cost efficiency).

These they suggest are the dynamic ‘factors’ of the digital economy, and must be harnessed in addition to the conventional factors of production, if firms seek to not just survive but also thrive in the new normal.

They are also outlining in this report,that  there are seven intangible sources of competitive advantage and are in effect, interconnected and complementary. The real sources of value creation today and gaining competitive advantage lies in fluid and constantly evolving intangibles, such as firm strategy and positioning, radical innovation and first mover advantages, intangible resources and competencies, organizational ambidexterity, network effects and externalities, transaction cost efficiency, and relational optimality.

It is the smart configurations, unique to each organization, of applying several or more of these intangibles that will create the new value in product and services and drive an even greater business model innovation change, to gain and sustain the competitive advantage.

The thinking they suggest requires a new ecosystem paradigm shift, needing a reinvention of the business model. I would suggest on the very way we manage innovation.

We must recognize our existing approaches to innovation need radically changing.

The post Shifting our dynamics to innovate within the digital age first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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 generally accepted view is that Innovation boosts a company’s earnings, speeds growth, ensures an advantage over competitors, and greatly appeals to shareholders. Put another way, businesses that deliver earnings growth based on a continuous stream of new products and services and new ways of doing business capture the innovation premium.

So tell me, why are we seemingly so bad at identifying what actually makes up our innovation capital, apart from some sweeping generalised statements attached in the accompanying comments within the financial result statements?

We need to find a way to unlock this as we are constantly being pushed for new business models that create, deliver and capture value. It is in the entire make up, the value structure around the offering, and this is made up of distinct capitals that drive the new business towards success.

How do I define innovation capital?

“Innovation capital is the sum of all that promotes the development and changes required for achieving innovation outcomes, within one organization or its broader networked environment, for market place advantage”.

“These are made up of the resources, processes, knowledge and capabilities, that are constantly evolving and highly dynamic to build greater innovating capacity.”

We are searching for what makes-up and provides the true value creation in successful outcomes; in final product, services, knowledge understanding or executing within further business models.

We need to understand what makes up innovation capital far more in the future.

Mostly this innovation capital comes from the different intellectual capitals, those unique sums within each organization, of knowledge made up of our human assets, organizational structures and social partners making up the organizations eco system.

It is when we bring these together in different, evolving ways we transform the knowledge into new economic value, through this organization and personal actions. Financial capital cannot do that; it can only fuel the other capitals, it lies idle until we employ the other capitals.

The hard part is valuing innovation capital as these are constantly being renewed and evolving.

Innovation capital is a set of renewal capabilities and understanding what these are is critical but today is not well understood. We find it extremely difficult to report clearly on the makeup of our innovating capital yet investors are increasingly attributing more to the intangibles, based on limited knowledge.

Determining and being able to articulate the value within these capitals would be truly valuable and would help us differentiate between those that are static or simply repeating, and those that are dynamic, ever evolving, searching for new knowledge.

How can we capture and articulate the innovation capital?

I believe we can. One of the big key’s to identifying innovation capital lies in its stocks and knowledge building assets and their uniqueness in the resources that make this up, in constantly evolving and learning, these are the a real strategic asset.

Leveraging the ‘stock’ of our innovation capital can render different productive value outcomes.

It is our ability to ‘mix and combine’ the innovation activity that it consists of, in all the decisions and activities that occur, from the recognition of a need or a problem, through research, development and commercialization of an invention into successful market outcomes builds the capital.

Knowing this make-up of our innovation capital provides us the potential for driving our future growth. Identifying the real capital that will drive and sustain real advantage, providing the future potential for new wealth should be the essential way we measure organizations performance, not on past financial performance or personal perception, built on limited understanding.

We need greater insights into all our organizations ‘collective’ capitals

It is the ‘combination effect’ of leveraging all our capitals that yields the real lasting sustaining values. Today, we are lost in numbers and details, financials dominate most discussions, we need to encourage exploration into the make up of all our capitals.

Until we can peer under the organizations ‘hood’ a little more and understand the make up of all the capitals then we will continually fail to understand the real innovation activity that generates the value.

We need to know more on what can and does ‘drive’ future performance, what lies at its core or is being built-in for new capabilities and capacities to innovate, looking to secure the future.

If we had a better understanding of the make up the innovation capital, and what makes up the critical enablers, then we are better positioned to qualify and even quantify a more confident future, based on the capital that ‘feeds’ this future potential.

The post Holding the innovations of the future back first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.