The Elite Network Redefining Business Innovation through Ecosystem thinking and Design

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, true transformation requires more than conventional consulting. It demands the collective wisdom of elite minds working in concert—executives who have navigated complex challenges, pioneered breakthrough innovations, and transformed industries.

A really rewarding Networked community needs to be open and sharing. Exchanging experiences, applying understanding and working alongside clients looking to make change as they search for new value, growth, impact and different outcomes needs expertise and transitional skills.

Smart Agility Intelligence sets out to provide the human and Gen AI resource that enables and empowers change. It is your trusted, collaborative and knowledgeable advisory service.

Our Distinction

Smart Agility Intelligence isn’t merely an advisory service—it’s a curated ecosystem of distinguished industry veterans, thought leaders, and change agents who share a commitment to creating exceptional value. Our network connects enterprises with an unparalleled caliber of expertise that conventional consulting firms simply cannot match.

The Power of Elite Collective Intelligence

What sets Smart Agility Intelligence apart is our deliberate cultivation of diversity in experience and perspective. Our members represent:

• C-Suite Veterans who have led organizational transformations across multiple industries
• Innovation Pioneers responsible for market-defining products and services
• Strategic Architects with proven track records in building sustainable growth engines
• Technology Visionaries who understand how to leverage emerging capabilities for genuine competitive advantage
• Investment Strategists skilled in identifying and nurturing high-potential opportunities

Our Value Proposition

For Our Clients:

• Access to a caliber of strategic insight typically reserved for Fortune 100 boardrooms
• Custom-assembled advisory teams perfectly matched to your specific challenge
• Implementation support from professionals who have executed similar transformations
• Breakthrough thinking that transcends industry boundaries and conventional approaches
• Lasting connections to a network that continues to contribute to your success

For Our Members:

• Participation in intellectually stimulating, high-impact engagements
• Profit-sharing model that properly values elite expertise and concrete results
• Association with fellow thought leaders in a prestigious, invitation-only community
• Opportunities to shape emerging industries and solve significant business challenges
• Platform for advancing personal thought leadership and professional legacy

The post The Elite Network first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

“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 marketplace advantage”

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

“These build upon the capabilities of ‘sensing, seizing and transforming’ to build new capital that focuses more upon the dynamics within innovation, that provide the true value creation in successful outcomes in the final product, services or executing within business models”

We need to value both “stocks and flows” in equal attention to build innovation capital

The ‘stock’ of innovation capital can render different productive value outcomes, is a bundle of the firm’s resources/assets and holds the renewal capabilities and they possess attributes that make it a “strategic asset”

Innovation capital is made up of many different assets that are often context specific, and interconnected and this makes it hard to build without taking a broader, more holistic approach to developing your capabilities, capacities, and competencies to innovate. You ‘map’ and align these to fit your strategic goals and aspirations.

We have a pressing need to clarify a new ‘valuing model’ for building innovation capital and each organization has a unique bundle of the firm’s resources and assets. It is the ability to integrate, reconfigure, renew and recreate these resources and turn these into new, more dynamic capabilities that build on a continuous basis the innovation capital.

This is one of my most important focus points to assist and aid organizations in their understanding “what makes up their unique innovation capital” and what needs to be added to deepen and strengthen this capital stock.

Building our stock then leads to the flow that then leads to building more stock. We need both stocks and flow

Most of our capitals are learning capitals

The more we strengthen our knowledge and value our people the more we can generate new knowledge, build greater narratives, deepen discussions, make better connections and build our interactions out across growing communities. The more we discover, the more knowledge we gain and this leads up to determine a potentially better decision-making that should, in theory, give greater confidence that our invested financial capital is in ‘good hands’. Our knowledge learning, the more dynamic, the more we search, absorb, called absorptive capacity and then diffuse, the more valuable it becomes.

The power lies in the linkages we can forge, in the acquisition, in assimilation and then into the eventual transformation that allows known knowledge to become new wealth-generating innovation.

My stated value position is…

I provide different framing techniques for helping to grow this necessary innovation capital and build the stock of the capabilities and capacities to enable and increase the dynamic flow of innovation activities.

The post Defining Innovation Capital first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Organizations have been focused for far too long around the importance of financial capital. It determines and drives organizations destinies. We are caught in a constant focus upon our achieving a return on our (financial) capital as our measuring criteria. Organizations strive for improving their ROCE, RONA, IRR,  EVA and a host of other financial measures.

As Clayton Christensen has been arguing the agenda of organizations begins and ends with the “search for numbers”. I think there is a time for changing this, we need to search for the knowledge that makes-up eventually the numbers.

There has been a distant voice for some time putting forward the need to appreciate and value the other capitals sitting within organizations. Much of the discussions have been housed under the term “intellectual capital” which denotes the sum of knowledge made up and contributed by our human assets, our organizational structures and our relationships that are developed.

These are the ‘capitals’ that transform into economic value through organization action. It is the financial capital that simply finances this.

Financial capital dominates any discussions

Yet financial capital and all its associated aspects rules, no, it utterly dominates. It totally fails to tell us in numbers alone where and what creates the value, it simply reports it.

It is this financial capital through our profit and loss, our balance sheets hides the value, or spreads it out in ways no one really understands its make-up.

Certainly those attempting to judge an organization just have to rely on a ‘history of numbers’ and some ‘selective’ market view to make investment judgements.

Equally those often running our organizations have a restricted view of where their real capital lies, as they focus on the numbers and then work down.

Today,we are  in a rapidly changing world and we need to understand it differently

The reliance of financial capital being the absolute measure is being challenged thankfully. Our business world is facing considerable disruptions from the accepted past practices, performance has become more volatile, more dynamic, more reliant on understanding that knowledge is where the value lies.

“Business as usual” is thankfully in a steep but protracted decline, the necessity today is to be constantly evolving and learning and that comes from knowledge acquisition, assimilation and then transforming and exploiting this into new value. We need to find new models for evaluating our real value and capital stock.

These ‘absorptive capacities’ are where we need to manage our knowledge flows better to translate and direct our understanding of new, value creating capital. We need to report on these far more as they offer the ‘residing’ and new stock that gives us new innovation potential and fresh value.

Learning capital needs to emerge and dominate future discussions

We need to give increasing incentives for organizations to learn. We need to judge the quality of this learning, not listen to ‘bland’ statements often presented. We need to know where this knowledge is targeted in narrative, discussions, spillovers and interactions.

What is being exploited, what is being determined in the decision-making process to give greater confidence that our invested financial capital is “in good hands”.

Keeping reliant on just discussing the financials within organizations we know is not enough. We have to force better discussions on the make-up of the other capitals, as these are still poor, left to individual interpretation and variable and we need to change this.

We are increasing opening up

As organizations become more open (open innovation for instance) the strength of linkages, of knowledge exchange, the translation of these activities is becoming really valuable to understand and focus upon more.

Through many of our activities we actually ‘borrow’ and it is then the ‘dynamic linking’ that we bring into the process, gives up the increased potential of innovation. It is the ease of learning, the ability to acquire and apply knowledge that creates the potential for innovation.

How many organizations really articulate their knowledge capital in acquisition, assimilation and transformation? Do we know how ‘path dependent’ they are- are they lagging in the market, are they simply opportunistic, are they locked-in far too much in potential downside risks.

Do they suffer from cognitive failure, do they lack the appropriate competencies to meet the constant challenges occurring around them. How much of this can you really extract from cold, hard numbers? Not a great deal.

Recognizing where our true value resides

The real problem we have is the lack of appreciation of what makes up our value, the real underlying wealth creating value, the one that truly ‘generates’. The tangible part is easier to appreciate (plant, land, material etc.) but is becoming a significantly declining part of the total sum of value of our organizations- sometimes it is only making up 30 percent..

It is our difficulties of understanding the intangibles as it is a very challenging task. Yet this has huge implications on the ‘health’ of the organizations we continue to invest in. Most organizations resort to “inferring” the value. This needs to change. The value today is in the interactions between the different components that make up our intangibles, out intellectual capital.

We are in need to identify what ‘drives’ organizations and that is our knowledge stock

For gaining and sustaining real advantage, and showing why it has the potential for creating new wealth we need to understand our capital stock.

This needs to be far more forwards looking; it needs to be more open and more transparent and it needs to ‘flow through’ the organization to find the potential to find new value from innovation. The call is growing increasingly for a new valuation model.

Static knowledge where we view financial numbers, never take our knowledge beyond what we are reading, failing to connect it and advance it is just not good enough, we do need to understand the underlying dynamic capabilities that make-up the organization. We need to access, absorb and translate our knowledge stock, allow it to flow and be developed into greater value-adding stock and innovation outcomes.

The post Struggling with counting ALL the sums of our capital first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Much of my focus within my work is to move organizations towards recognizing and expanding their innovation capital or stock.

The hard part for many organizations is that many of the key elements of innovation capital consist of many intangibles as well as tangibles and this needs deeper understanding and appreciation. These intangibles are in most cases non-technological and embodied in the organizational routines and thinking of the employees.

It is focusing on building the stock of this innovation capital as well as making the flow more dynamic, ever evolving, adapting and changing to the different conditions being presented to the company.

Some of the critical elements that need to be considered can be described as follows:

• Innovation strategy that relates to strategic choices a firm makes regarding its innovation
• The selection of the type of innovation that fits best the firm’s objectives and the allocation of resources to different types of innovations.
• Innovation culture that is the mixture of the innovation-related attitudes, experiences, beliefs and values of the employees
• The integrating function of environment, culture and climates that stimulates innovation activities.
• Innovation structure that are formed to make up the innovation process, its governance and supporting intent
• The approach within the organization and the way the employees engaged in the innovation and how they are grouped and measured
• Knowledge (technological and non-technological) possessed by the employees engaged in the innovation process as much of the knowledge is tacit to varying degrees.
• The stock of knowledge can be increased by internal and external learning of an organization

It is the abilities of our internal learning as ongoing provides the creation for new knowledge within the enterprise.

Stocks and flows need equal attention to build innovation capital

The ‘stock’ of innovation capital can render different productive value outcomes, is a bundle of the firm’s resources/assets and holds the renewal capabilities and they possesses attributes that make it a “strategic asset”

Innovation capital are made up of assets that are often context specific and interconnected and this makes it hard to build without a broad holistic approach

We have a pressing need to clarify a new ‘valuing model’ for building innovation capital and each organization has a unique bundle of the firms resources and assets. It is the ability to integrate, reconfigure, renew and recreate these resources and turn these into new, more dynamic capabilities.

This is one of my most important focus points to assist and aid organizations in their understanding “what makes up their unique innovation capital” and what needs to be added to deepen and strengthen this capital stock.

I provide different framing techniques for helping to grow this necessary innovation capital and the capacity to enable and increase the dynamic flow of innovation activities.

The post Understanding that innovation capital becomes your new core first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Achieving innovation fitness is a journey- to get there we often have to manage the switchbacks as we build our capabilities and capacities to innovate.

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

2. The Fuel of Innovation Performance – the dynamics of innovation

• A sharper, clearer focus on innovation resources to meet 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

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 bringing these in successfully. 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

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
• Simulation modelling 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 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 out – manoeuvring
• 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 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 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

As you can see this is applying a very comprehensive approach, a fairly ‘intensive’ one.  This might alter individually after some clear piloting, learning and experimentation undertaken.  Building innovation capabilities takes time; they are complex, highly structured and multi-dimensional. Any structured approach to tackling innovation takes time and considerable commitment.

The post 9 Stages for building innovation fitness first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Determining future innovation outcomes requires a greater understanding of what capabilities are more useful to develop, those that offer a more dynamic capacity. Do you know yours?

Can you separate these from the many you have that fail to give innovation impact?

We never start from a blank innovation canvas.

None of us has a ‘blank’ innovation canvas, we have developed a present position; one that is built on a legacy of past work and from our needs built up from our innovation activity, also in the past. As these develop we make choices, we sometimes become locked into certain structures, systems and processes, so we find it often highly difficult on how we are going to change, to move from one position to a different one – traversing the landscape to achieve better solutions to meet different goals that meet the present or future needs.

Have you ever evaluated your capabilities, competencies and capacities to innovation in light of a changing landscape? 

One where competitors have gained new ground or you have been confronted with a more disruptive product that threatens your established position, or has even the potential to threaten your very existence? Your ability to respond to changing positions are often determined by knowing which capabilities and capacities you can call upon and leverage for finding new solutions that accelerate and innovate your position to respond and stay competitive.

Do you know which are your more dynamic and valuable capabilities?

How do you go about and recognize these and to be able to separate them from many of your existing assets, that make a valuable contribution but do not have the dynamic potential to change, to rapidly increase performance and offer a distinctive future advantage.

The more dynamic, evolving ones  that lead to new growth identification, new creations and solutions, that deliver new opportunities to compete in changing market conditions. These strengthen not just critical capabilities they build upon them a far more distinctive advantage.

Today we need to constantly orchestrate our innovation capital; it needs to be context specific and highly interconnected. Are yours?

Gaining awareness is an evolutionary path of becoming highly adaptive

• Knowing your dynamic capabilities to traverse a highly competitive landscape needs an understanding.

• Knowing your innovation fitness is becoming essential for your future growth and sustainability.

Exploring this dedicated site set up for determining the practice of building your innovation fitness is a good starting point.

The end result is offering you the components to focus upon through by identifying and building those dynamic capabilities

Can I help you identify and determine your core dynamic components? I believe so, why not find out and ask?

The post The dynamic points of innovation understanding first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I felt it was time to make a restatement.

Let me restate what I am focusing upon here, in this work and why it has a separate, dedicated website to allow me to evolve and share in this discovery and thinking through journey.

So my hypothesis, hopefully covered off in this initial explanation is made on the basis of growing research and evidence, as an investigative point for further work-to-be-done in thinking and constructing around the plotting or mapping out specific innovation landscapes that deliver the innovation capabilities needed.

This work is now at a point it needs additional help to take this out further in a testing and experimental environment and I am looking for one or more ‘willing’ organizations to be the pilot for this to validate and further improve from the learning.

The Challenge I’m trying to Solve

Knowing what are the critical factors for innovation and their dependence for sustaining innovation success are becoming a vital necessity to understand so an organization can place the appropriate resources behind them. The question is, which are critical, which naturally occur when others begin to be put into place, which seem to have limited or no real effect on changing the dynamics of innovation?

Knowing these and having these clearer shown as a ‘return on impact/investment’ (ROII) has real business value. Today, we lack a clear system model that brings the critical innovation factors out and gives them their appropriate values, and then can equally provide the ability to model different future states and conceive future scenarios through different impact-investments.

We need to recognize Resources are scarce and need constant renewal

We still don’t understand the ‘dynamics’ of innovation, the interdependency of the parts. Which parts have greater impact, which are not so important? Innovation is still not treated company-wide in a holistic way as recognition of the dependencies is poorly understood. This is what needs to change.

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

Why do I think Fitness Landscapes will help?

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 ‘dynamic capability” to be achieved, to be available and constantly being built up as they are in flux and change. The basic question that needs to be addressed is “what is our dynamic capabilities and more importantly which critical ones should we focus upon to improve our capabilities and competences to innovate?”

The solution I am looking for offers Innovation Fitness landscapes by provide the understanding of the existing position and ‘point towards’ where to place your resource to improve your innovative capacity to adjust and deliver the capabilities and capacities to meet the challenges on hand. Equally to project and forecast the gaps needing solutions to bridge.

Fitness Landscapes as a solution has its roots in Darwin.

In any competitive situation, the survival of the fittest dominates (Darwinian). Knowing your innovation fitness is essential in this race. The question often raised is where do we focus our limited resource to achieve a better fitness to be successful at innovation?

Mapping out innovation capabilities and capacities

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 and apply the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain and move towards greater and more successful innovation outcomes. The greater the ‘fitness’ and peaks obtained transforms your landscape potential into accelerating opportunities and increasing tangible outcomes.

These critical factors that are identified give higher value potential or ‘peaks’ that are more valuable to your needs. The more ‘rugged or diverse’ the landscape can also determine the greater fitness needed for a higher rate of innovation. The strength of the peaks in these landscapes illustrates how intense the innovation challenge is, and the number of critical peaks shows how diverse it potentially is to have resolved as contributing factors.
The ability to identifying the emerging patterns provides the need to act and invest, you begin to make adaptive walks, so as to move you to the higher fitness points where innovation viability is enhanced and understanding is needed to be in place so as to resolve the challenges faced. Greater fitness 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.

Moving towards a solution

I want to take this (pioneering) work out for testing and experimenting, to calibrate its framework so it delivers a strong rigor and validation to take out and scale further.  This is why I believe I am at a point of needing some invested time by a client or two to work on this with me in this testing, validation environment.

The solution is a framework that shows promise but it needs to go further from theory into practice. What are the mutual dependencies, how the innovation ‘system’ behaves, what are its more important impact factors which are weaker and what should be considered in the ‘best’ innovation environment?

The key is to know what are those capability points that are dynamic and highly relevant to the delivery of innovation, and dampening down the ones that are less so. A greater innovation fitness equates to more value creation potential as clear distinctive capabilities emerge as points of greater value, these are the dynamic points of your innovation need.

The post Restating the Value Proposition of Innovation Fitness 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.

Let me share the part that works really well for me. This relates to approaching social media but it equally applies to building innovation capital, it is recognizing and then building the stock and the flows around innovation.

Robin Sloan does a brilliant job of explaining this:

“One of the biggest takeaways was the concept of stock and flow. Do you know about this? Couldn’t be simpler, and really, it’s not even that much of an a-ha.

There are two kinds of quantities in the world. Stock is a static value: money in the bank, or trees in the forest. Flow is a rate of change: fifteen dollars an hour, or three thousand toothpicks a day. Easy – too easy.

But I actually think stock and flow is the master metaphor for media today. Here’s what I mean:

• Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist.
• Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.

I feel like flow is ascendant these days, for obvious reasons—but we neglect stock at our own peril.
I mean that both in terms of the health of an audience and, like, the health of a soul. Flow is a treadmill, and you can’t spend all of your time running on the treadmill. Well, you can. But then one day you’ll get off and look around and go: Oh man. I’ve got nothing here.

But I’m not saying you should ignore flow! No: this is no time to hole up and work in isolation, emerging after long months or years with your perfectly-polished opus. Everybody will go: huh? Who are you? And even if they don’t—even if your exquisitely-carved marble statue of Boba Fett is the talk of the tumblrs for two whole days—if you don’t have flow to plug your new fans into, you’re suffering a huge (here it is!) opportunity cost. You’ll have to find them all again next time you emerge from your cave.

You can tell that I want you to stop and think about stock here. I feel like we all got really good at flow, really fast. But flow is ephemeral. Stock sticks around. Stock is capital. Stock is protein. And the real magic trick in 2010 is to put them both together. To keep the ball bouncing with your flow—to maintain that open channel of communication—while you work on some kick-ass stock in the background. Sacrifice neither. It’s the hybrid strategy.

Anyway: this is not a huge insight, I know. Mostly I just wanted to share the lingo, because it’s been echoing in my head since my first microeconomics course. Today, whenever I put my hands on the keyboard, I’m asking myself: Is this stock? Is this flow? How’s my mix? Do I have enough of both?”

Source: Robin Sloan http://snarkmarket.com/2010/4890

He also added “You’re totally right about the interplay; when everything’s working together, stock leads to flow leads to stock”. “Building bridges between stock and flow”

The post Building bridges between stocks and flows first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Achieving innovation fitness is a journey- to get there we often have to manage the switchbacks as we build our capabilities and capacities to innovate.

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

2. The Fuel of Innovation Performance – the dynamics of innovation

• A sharper, clearer focus on innovation resources to meet 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

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 bringing these in successfully. 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

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
• Simulation modelling 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 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 out – manoeuvring
• 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 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 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

As you can see this is applying a very comprehensive approach, a fairly ‘intensive’ one.  This might alter individually after some clear piloting, learning and experimentation undertaken.  Building innovation capabilities takes time; they are complex, highly structured and multi-dimensional. Any structured approach to tackling innovation takes time and considerable commitment.

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