Innovation is swimming in uncertain waters

June 20, 2011Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, gaining innovation momentum, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Leading innovation, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Innovation is very often swimming in uncertain waters that rise and fall just like the waves in a sea: they are choppy, demanding and exhausting to fight against.

As uncertainty constantly arises as we discover more, and expend more energy, the very nature of our original starting point set down in a well-thought-out, and well-crafted strategy actually begins to suddenly have a realization that needs a radical change in direction..

Then we are left with more ‘open-ended’ questions than answers. Welcome to real innovation where faith and belief play an important part.

There often seems to be constantly arising critical unknowns and sometimes all you are left with as your innovation emerges is just actually and simply a new starting point.

A new starting point as the concept is so different to cause you to rethink dramatically. Innovation and its journey of discovery take you into so many new areas you never expected when you first thought of the idea or concept.

What do you do? Do you abandon this or press on? What helps us maintain a commitment and a course?

Appropriate Innovation Makes Good Sense.

June 17, 2011Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, gaining innovation momentum, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Leading innovation, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Innovation should always deliver on a specific purpose or promise, often it simply doesn’t. It needs to be suitable to our needs; it needs to resolve a given job-to-be done.

In the developed world we are consistently over-delivering innovation for many and there is a given cost to that, which we all pay for even though we often don’t really need it in the first place.

Take, for example, the software provided by Microsoft for its windows application, in its office versions, they all are over-specified for our personal needs.

The majority of these ‘sit’ on our computers taking up space and never used. This continued requirement which we are forced to constantly upgrade requires us to seek more computing power yet it is really inappropriate for most people’s needs.

Questions raised on a collaborative innovation framework

May 6, 2011Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Foster Performance, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Innovation strategy, Leading innovation, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Yesterday, 5th May, there was an interesting exchange on #innochat relating to collaborating frameworks for innovation. We have a wiki on this http://cirf.pbworks.com if you care to take a look so you get the context and the suggested framework we are proposing.

#Innochat is a lively, informative and inspiring one-hour(ish) discussion on Thursdays at noon (Eastern US time). Usually the best way to follow along is to head over to TweetChat – sign in with your Twitter credentials and follow along and participate. Take a look at www.innochat.com and join in.

Jeffrey Philips @ovoinnovation and myself @paul4innovating have been suggesting that we need to organize more around a common approach to innovation and has recently published this we decided to put this forward within this discussion hour to learn more from many established innovation thinkers.

The fact that Twitter decided to go ‘whaling’, stalling and generally misbehaving to create some bottleneck in exchanges, did seem to generate a lot of ‘chat’ and a great diversity of opinion.

Societal Innovation – challenging our future thinking

March 10, 2011Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Leading innovation, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

There needs to be this major shift from market-led to more societal led organizations occurring. We see pockets of this in a number of business organizations offering clearer governance and sustainability outlines as part of their annual reporting.

We need to push them a lot harder. We need to move away from business-only innovation into a society based.

The shifts taking place

Society has shifted, is shifting; the consumer is becoming the supplier of content, meaning, of their taste preferences, their emotions and the goods and services they will buy. Mass consumption, the model honed in the 20th century doesn’t work anymore.

Customers are actually saying “less choice, more say” and seeking deeper self-determination. This personalising of preference can seem more complex for organizations but there are many ways to manage this it requires real change in organizations, oriented to society more, serving them more.

The marketing thinking is in need of adaptation also.

Everything seemingly comes in seven or does it?

January 25, 2011Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Leading innovation, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Recently I was going through my files and was amazed how the use of seven came up to form some sort of magic seven frameworks. I’m not sure if we can blame this all on the “seven wonders of the world” but ‘seven’ has some magic perhaps when it also comes to listing. Is it because our attention span can’t absorb more than seven things at a time?

Ok, I can hear my wife say “Seven, you, huh!”
Let me give you a flavour of this use of ‘seven’

  • Seven keys to designing your innovation
  • Seven success factors
  • Seven habits of effective people
  • Seven innovation myths
  • Seven kinds of consequences
  • Seven deadly sins of Road-mapping
  • Seven levels of sustainability
  • 3M’s seven pillars for innovation

The list could go on….and on. So why does seven seemingly loom so large for us?

Moving towards a more distributed innovation model

November 15, 2010Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, innovation execution delivery, Leading innovation, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

How are we going to really unlock the true potential of frontline managers, middle managers and the whole workforce for ‘seeing’ and engaging for their contribution to innovation?

Far too many organizations still don’t provide the opportunity for everyone to contribute to innovation. I think as open innovation moves from the labs and research centres then OI will be one of the ways for a shift in thinking to take place, not just with the outside world but within the inside organization for a number of reasons.

Critical needs of open innovation are the trust, the behaviors and the relationships that need to be at the forefront of thinking when you engage in more opening up to fresh avenues of innovation thinking. I think this changing mindset of how to manage within will permeate throughout the organization more and more as these (often dormant but available) skills get put into practice more.

We struggle to get rid of the ‘command and control’ approach to encourage more distributed sharing and exchanges to reflect the need today of being more agile and fluid in how we meet rapidly changing market conditions and counter threats or seize breaking opportunities.

How can we influence leadership in everyday contexts?

Making untested hypotheses compatible to Business model innovation success

October 29, 2010Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Leading innovation, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

An email from Business model innovation hub (http://bit.ly/bnTd6G) landed on my laptop that stopped me to think a little harder on the whole momentum of Business model innovation. It summarized the ‘breaking’ collaborative work going on between Alexander Osterwalder, Steve Blank, Alan Smith and Bob Dorf.

This is around untested hypotheses coming out of new business models, that need a better structured and systematic way of exploring these to test assumptions, as early as possible within the lifetime of the model.


A breaking collaboration that seems really valuable

Steve Blank has summarized this first step in the collaboration in an entry on his site www.steveblank.com under http://bit.ly/9cElPf. He stopped me in my tracks (well briefly) with the statement that the “Business model canvas was at the end of the day a tool for brainstorming hypotheses without a formal way of testing them”- “a static planning tool”- the very thing I thought the canvas was taking us away from.

Simplicity drives Adoption often in Innovation

October 22, 2010Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Leading innovation, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation
Getting us lined up for adoption

Keeping it simple can often drive adoption. This week I had the pleasure of attending a Brightidea (https://www.brightidea.com/)  “Birds of a Feather” event in Zurich.  A pleasure clearly, why? Simply because it turned out differently than I had expected. Let me explain.

I have a tendency to be wary of claims or statements like “global leaders in innovation management” and “driven more success than any other innovation management solution provider” as it is hard to validate that from simply what I can read on Brightidea’s website, or through verification of independent research.

What can be said as a growing validation though is that they are clearly being increasingly recognised by many global customers as an important platform contributor to their collaborative innovation process.

The yin yang of innovation understanding

August 3, 2010Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Leading innovation, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Can we recognize yin yang as a dual force of innovation?

Scholars tell us that there are two natural complementary yet contradictory forces at work within our universe.

 

The Chinese call these ‘Yin Yang’. Yin is regarded as more passive, receptive, more outside-in, whereas Yang is more active, creative and inside-out. These are seemingly opposing forces but interconnected and interdependent; one gives rise to the other, they actually reinforce each other.

Yin & yang seemingly have the following characteristics: they are opposing yet equally rooted together; they have the power to transform each other and eventually are balanced out.

Exnovations place in the innovation life cycle

August 3, 2010Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Foster Performance, Leading innovation, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

I was some time back reminded about the term “exnovation” in an interim report prepared for NESTA by the City University, London and the Work Psychology Group entitled “Characteristics & Behaviours of Innovative People in Organizations.”

Exnovation is if you were unaware, is at the end of the innovation life-cycle, where it “discards” or even purges existing practices to allow the organization to adopt different and fresh thinking to any new innovation activities.

A number of writers have discussed exnovation but its first use was attributed to Kimberly in 1981, who described innovation as a series of processes which in combination define an innovation life-cycle (Fiona Patterson, City University for NESTA).