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.

The challenges of managing in today’s worlds are tough, very tough and demanding. It is so volatile, potentially disruptive and full of risk. Organizations are simply struggling to shed their clothes in the 20^th century and find a way to smoothly manage to become more adaptable and agile in form. They are adjusting to offer consistent responses to instability in the most effective ways, to keep adapting to the consistent market challenges, and in so doing profiting from meeting that latest challenge or disruptive opportunity.

The problem is you simply can’t manage this smoothly, it will be highly disruptive as the organization re-equips themselves and learns, often in the hardest way possible, through failure, through experimentation, through risk-taking. Innovation is increasingly seen as the pathway forward in capturing growth and grabbing any advantage, even if these are increasingly transient. Yet as we look towards building our innovation capabilities we need to work in totally different ways and see ‘things’ in new ways.

Innovation in itself is also a force of instability and we need to find ways to embrace much of its uncertainties by understanding its dynamics. We need to have a major shift in our organizational thinking, needed to find the appropriate new balance within those dual ‘tensions’ of ‘stability’ through efficiency, with its opposite, ‘change’ driven by innovation. It is these dynamic forces within the world we work that need us to respond by building that capacity for managing those ‘dynamic’ innovation capabilities, that today’s markets are requiring and organizations are needing to master.

The emphasis needs to point more to building dynamic innovation capabilities

Dynamic capabilities emphasize management capabilities and the inimitable (unique) combinations of resources that are constantly at work across all functions to make them distinctive and valuable.

Distinguishing innovation capabilities that are relevant are based on the type of knowledge they contain. Functional capabilities allow development of technical, practical knowledge. Integrative capabilities allow firms to absorb knowledge from external sources and this is where absorptive capacity and its structure comes into our required thinking. Innovation requires us to constantly learn, develop, mold and manage multiple situations and challenges. This requires the integration of critical capabilities to successfully stimulate innovation for effective and improving performance.

Many of the identified resources in capabilities have some level of complementary, improving one triggers improvement in another. Equally ignoring one can impact negatively on others. So each component, on their own, have limited effect, it is the combined effect that generates the improving performance. Equally, the needs do change over time and you have to constantly ‘refresh, challenge and stimulate’ these, otherwise, you can have core rigidly set in.

Integrating back or making anew

To this end, I have produced a conceptual model of what I believe is the ‘make up’ for providing an ongoing innovation performance engine – the innovation fitness landscape and the dynamics of core capabilities. I felt it needed a dedicated website and this is where you have ended up to be the ‘go to’ source of reference. It is a work-in-progress so please recognize this when you find the time to explore it. The incentive to do this ‘exploring’ is quite simple, you are dealing in increasingly complex environments and you need to know your capabilities and capacities to innovate. If you don’t you will simply get lost and perhaps forgotten. Innovation offers relevancy and a path towards a sustainable future but it needs fresh approaches. I believe I can offer some insights to help.

The need for all of us is recognize and embrace the need to build an organization-wide innovation capability that should pervade all aspects of the organization’s existence, forming its new core innovation value.

The post The world is working within increased complexity, are you? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

There is a growing need for having some dynamic tensions within the organization’s system; these helps generate the better conditions for innovation to thrive. We are learning more on the better tools, techniques and approaches available for putting the learning tensions into our work, making them more dynamic, linked and increasingly relevant to the work to be done.

1). A common language is essential

Any dynamics in the system needs that ability to talk the same language, something that becomes common and embedded to support the routines and move quicker to the concepts and solutions, as others can ‘understand’ them as well. It is through working on the inner stories and appreciating the history, it is having an appreciation of events, good and bad, it is through local slogans, your jargon and dialogues that bring people together. The power of storytelling helps gain adoption and identification to those needs for working on a common cause.

2). Creating constant opportunities for conversations

So many organizations don’t work on the ongoing conversations, design workshops, road shows and dialogue sessions that give everyone linkage and growing identification. You begin to identify your sense of purpose and value contribution if there is a consistent diffusion of messages; these should be always lead from the top or moved up and down the organization to allow for these ongoing conversations.

3). Using the knowledge that resides

Organizations like to believe they are building domains of expertise but often they are actually building the silo’s to restrict the flow of knowledge. Knowing where the right functional expertise lies, the relevant skills, experiences or relevant insights ‘reside’ is increasingly important to throw open to all, to tap into, extract and contribute. This expertise can help with our daily routines by offering different thoughts, ideas and practices that may have a real impact on how you can change.

4). Wrapping up intelligence to give it real value and knowledge understanding

The bundling of intelligence is becoming critical. It needs to be increasingly shared across the organization at real time speed. As we look increasingly outside our organizations, our focal markets sensing and seizing the information and being able to connect it, to bundle it into knowledge that has potential application or relevance allows for absorptive capacities to really come to live. Those are able to learn to bring into the organization by accessing, anchoring and diffusing that external capacity for creating and exploiting new value.

5). Capturing and extracting tacit knowledge

Our ability to capture and access the tacit knowledge that resides in all our employees is a critical issue to achieve new dynamic tension. How do we harness tacit knowledge, capture it, even recognize its value we need to encourage a continuous learning environment, we need to have clear organization learning strategies. Tacit knowledge helps us tackle the unknowns associated with discovery. The more we share, put effort into collaborative ventures the more we learn. The more we engage with external experts the more we should gain from these exchanges. Context becomes vital, as does striving for that common language and association.

6). Allowing time to explore and improve our human capital

Tacit knowledge as it becomes embedded in shared values, assumptions and beliefs you can qualify and map tacit knowledge. Our tacit knowledge increases the human capital. It can, through creative acts give strong feeling and give a real sense of commitment. The more we explore, the more we ‘ignite our passions’ but you need to consciously find the time to explore by clearing the path to allow the absorbing to take place and then extract the knowledge through putting any challenge into context, allowing time to access, anchor and diffuse.

The ability to harness our dynamics is vital

The ability to make our environments more dynamic, more engaging, more challenging, more a place to learn and contribute allows greater movement and potential for innovation and growth. A growth that is for the organization and its people, to provide all the different intellectual capitals to combine, be those human (knowledge, skills and experiences), relationship (social and through our networks) or through the structural ones you put into place (where you pool knowledge, use routines and systems).

Good use of our intellectual capitals and knowing what these are, does allow for a greater unlocking of innovation value. The more we ‘work and encourage’ our learning capitals, combining the power that lies in the dynamic linkages we can forge, in acquisition, in assimilation and then into eventual transformation then this allows known knowledge to become new wealth-generating innovation

The post Putting some dynamic tension into the system 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.

They lead this article with “one view of complexity that holds that it is largely a bad thing- that simplification generally creates value by removing unnecessary costs”. Certainly we all yearn for a more simplified life, structure, organization, approach to systems or just reducing complexity in our daily lives to find time for what we view as improving its ‘quality’.

Within the article they argue there are two types of complexity – institutional and individual.

The former concerns itself with the interactions within the organization, the latter is the way individuals or managers deal personally with complexity.

The real important take away from this article for me was when organizations treat complexity as something they must overcome, reduce or try to ignore they miss opportunities. Complexity, the authors argue, should be seen as a challenge to be managed, managed well, and its full potential exploited, not as a problem to be reduced or eliminated. It is through the nature of these complexities we achieve competitive advantage and can exploit more of the flow of knowledge for those new sources of new profit and wealth creation.

They suggest organizations need to decide on where to hold complexity within any design and build the right capabilities where they matter. I would argue innovation certainly matters, and it is complex and needs to be understood as exactly that, and managed accordingly not in piece meal fashion. Complexity matters in building the right processes, skills and culture but because they don’t behave in linear ways and any ‘messing’ with the complexity and relationships within this can have an awful lot of unintended consequences.

We have choices of complexity

There are different types of complexity to manage. Work conducted by Julian Birkinshaw and Suzanne Heywood suggested four types of complexity. I only summarize these here.  Imposed complexity, those interventions both internally and externally that require ‘higher’ insight. There is the inherent complexity found with any organization and presently managed through striving to be more efficient and effective. There is designed in complexity, where innovation needs to fit more. These are choices about how, where and why an organization sets about its operation. These can be constrained, under invested in, even jettisoned but do have lasting consequences for the future of the organization. This is the area of strategic consequence as these can limit competitive advantaged from the level of innovation intensity chosen as an example. The fourth is unnecessary complexity where increased misalignment resides, it is sometimes easy to recognize but often hard to let go as it sometimes makes up “the way things are run around here” and have a richness in history.

The challenge of complexity within innovation

If you can begin to identify complexity that hampers effectiveness you can begin to remove it. What you have to be very clear upon is having a complete understanding, or a well informed one on all the effects if the complexity part you are removing is not the route to value and often innovation. The more creative side certainly does get constrained and caught up in this often shorter term pursuit of effectiveness for effectiveness sake and you suddenly don’t have the bandwidth for innovation exploration and more.

Do recognize that innovation is complex, recognize it does have to be handled carefully but it needs to also be fully understood for what it is, a complex adaptive system. It cannot be treated in the same way as effectiveness or efficiency can. It  needs ‘actively’ managing differently, for all the future opportunities it holds by placing the emphasis on building greater innovation capabilities to make it ‘dynamically’ work. Otherwise you end up with unexplained consequences to poorer performance from your innovation activities and often at a loss to explain why.

We do need to relate more to complexity as it comes with the turf if you want really lasting innovation.

The post Cracking the complexity code 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.

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.

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Just begin to work through these ‘thoughts’ to begin to evaluate the value of knowing your innovation fitness so as to find out what makes up your distinct dynamic capabilities:

• By firstly mapping out your innovation capabilities to the task at hand enables you to understand and relate to what is needed – we call that the context for innovation.

• Innovation Fitness Landscapes helps in this task by identifying the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts‐ and apply the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain or challenges you are facing.

• The greater understanding of the ‘fitness points needed’ can transform your innovation landscape potential, or in business parlance, achieve your goal.

• Achieving this fitness accelerates your opportunities into final tangible outcomes. Here is a little bit of the theory:  you look for those critical factors that will give higher value potential or ‘peaks’ that are more valuable to your needs.

• The more ‘rugged’ the landscape, the tougher the innovation challenge, can also determines the greater fitness for the rate of innovation needed.

• The height of the peaks in these landscapes, the greater value placed upon them, illustrates how intense the innovation challenge is, and the number of critical peaks shows how diverse its potentially is to then provide the appropriate resources.

• The ability to identifying the emerging patterns provides the need to act and invest, making adaptive even exploratory walks to provide the appropriate resources needed.

• Understanding these will enable you  to move you to the higher fitness points where innovation viability is enhanced and needed to be so as to resolve the challenges faced.

• You need to experiment, to take these exploratory ‘walk’s to realize the potential and learn how to scale accordingly.

All I’m doing here is prompting you to ask questions. We can discuss ways to tackle and resolve the questions this can arise and apply solutions to build your distinct innovation capabilities to offer you a more sustaining innovation future. Intersted?

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There is a growing need for having some dynamic tensions within the organization’s system; these helps generate the better conditions for innovation to thrive. We are learning more on the better tools, techniques and approaches available for putting the learning tensions into our work, making them more dynamic, linked and increasingly relevant to the work to be done.

1). A common language is essential

Any dynamics in the system needs that ability to talk the same language, something that becomes common and embedded to support the routines and move quicker to the concepts and solutions, as others can ‘understand’ them as well. It is through working on the inner stories and appreciating the history, it is having an appreciation of events, good and bad, it is through local slogans, your jargon and dialogues that bring people together. The power of storytelling helps gain adoption and identification to those needs for working on a common cause.

2). Creating constant opportunities for conversations

So many organizations don’t work on the ongoing conversations, design workshops, road shows and dialogue sessions that give everyone linkage and growing identification. You begin to identify your sense of purpose and value contribution if there is a consistent diffusion of messages; these should be always lead from the top or moved up and down the organization to allow for these ongoing conversations.

3). Using the knowledge that resides

Organizations like to believe they are building domains of expertise but often they are actually building the silo’s to restrict the flow of knowledge. Knowing where the right functional expertise lies, the relevant skills, experiences or relevant insights ‘reside’ is increasingly important to throw open to all, to tap into, extract and contribute. This expertise can help with our daily routines by offering different thoughts, ideas and practices that may have a real impact on how you can change.

4). Wrapping up intelligence to give it real value and knowledge understanding

The bundling of intelligence is becoming critical. It needs to be increasingly shared across the organization at real time speed. As we look increasingly outside our organizations, our focal markets sensing and seizing the information and being able to connect it, to bundle it into knowledge that has potential application or relevance allows for absorptive capacities to really come to live. Those are able to learn to bring into the organization by accessing, anchoring and diffusing that external capacity for creating and exploiting new value.

5). Capturing and extracting tacit knowledge

Our ability to capture and access the tacit knowledge that resides in all our employees is a critical issue to achieve new dynamic tension. How do we harness tacit knowledge, capture it, even recognize its value we need to encourage a continuous learning environment, we need to have clear organization learning strategies. Tacit knowledge helps us tackle the unknowns associated with discovery. The more we share, put effort into collaborative ventures the more we learn. The more we engage with external experts the more we should gain from these exchanges. Context becomes vital, as does striving for that common language and association.

6). Allowing time to explore and improve our human capital

Tacit knowledge as it becomes embedded in shared values, assumptions and beliefs you can qualify and map tacit knowledge. Our tacit knowledge increases the human capital. It can, through creative acts give strong feeling and give a real sense of commitment. The more we explore, the more we ‘ignite our passions’ but you need to consciously find the time to explore by clearing the path to allow the absorbing to take place and then extract the knowledge through putting any challenge into context, allowing time to access, anchor and diffuse.

The ability to harness our dynamics is vital

The ability to make our environments more dynamic, more engaging, more challenging, more a place to learn and contribute allows greater movement and potential for innovation and growth. A growth that is for the organization and its people, to provide all the different intellectual capitals to combine, be those human (knowledge, skills and experiences), relationship (social and through our networks) or through the structural ones you put into place (where you pool knowledge, use routines and systems).

Good use of our intellectual capitals and knowing what these are, does allow for a greater unlocking of innovation value. The more we ‘work and encourage’ our learning capitals, combining the power that lies in the dynamic linkages we can forge, in acquisition, in assimilation and then into eventual transformation then this allows known knowledge to become new wealth-generating innovation

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