The Outcomes Expected from this Work

IFD Outcomes

All I can  share are the result outcomes I would like to achieve from this work with you:

Expected results I am seeking out of this work for you will lead too:

  1. A framework that moves towards a company-wide development program that gains identification and the target of company-wide improvement of routines and different skills required for innovation to succeed/ improve and be distinctive.
  2. Pursuing limited or ‘selective’ development will not have the desired effect, it is not just a human resource department exercise or individual division or team level exercise, but provide a framework that offers the real answer to innovation and why it does require a ‘holistic’ view of innovation development to manage.
  3. Be in a position to challenges long-established organizational capabilities and routines that are taking place by knowing where (and why) they reside and are often more ‘static’ in reality than understood. Often many of these ‘static’ capabilities are simply not valuable to further invest in, the waste of precious funds just for the sake of it, as other areas identified offer a more dynamic aspect closer to achieving the strategic results set within the corporate strategy for innovation return.
  4. Importance of linking capability to become dynamic with the strategy gives greater alignment and potential and can offer a clear capability portfolio where resource needs to be applied to bring new value and alignment to the organizations goals.
  5. The internal dialogue generates a self-reflection process for identification of true and ‘false’ dynamic capabilities and identifies the more static ones that often just need reinforcement. The solutions draw out internal discussions for a recognition and reality of the present and future needs in this area of innovation resource allocation.
  6. It provides the means to achieve additional resource allocation and raising the importance of these to support the strategic intent of the company and it intensifies and solidifies the studies and importance of innovation within the framework of the organization as an area of specialised knowledge.
  7. Results achieved from this raises the need to understand dynamic innovation capability. Knowing the importance and effect of dynamism for the growing need of greater flexibility and agility in changing, challenging times becomes a clear focus. Then through seeking routines and knowing the diversity within these choices, one can identify the basis of sound differentiation to meet different innovation challenges.

Identifying your critical innovation capabilities

IFD Identify

My work on dynamic capabilities for innovation

Over a period of the last thirty months or so, I have been studying and researching this whole area. I have some hypotheses that need testing but the outcome of this effort to date has got me closer to believing we can achieve greater identification with those distinct capabilities to support EACH unique position.

Firstly you have to keep in mind the big four issues to think around 1) the Environment Complexity, 2) The Existing Asset Base, 3) the Value Creation Mechanisms established, and lastly 4) the Organizing Context of what innovation needs to achieve for the organization. Context for me is really important and often lacking.

The objectives behind this work are to show present and future impact of innovation.

Simply put it is to provide a robust model that understands the critical aspects that impact innovation, that can show the critical dependencies to focus upon and understand there need, so these can lead to which ones are more likely to deliver ‘greater’ growth through a more focused approach and provide longer‐term sustainability in innovation activity.

So what are Innovation Fitness Landscapes?

“The greater the fitness to innovate will equate to more value creation potential.”

I believe we do need to provide a solution to this understanding the innovation challenge by constructing a more comprehensive framework. Part of my present work is to find a working model to achieve this, I’m getting close.

It is this critical need of any business organization or country for wealth creation through (new) growth and successful innovation lies in understanding the path to achieving this. But what are the factors, the enablers to support this? It is by identifying the more dynamic capabilities and then plotting these to understand your existing ‘fitness’. There is still today far too much of a ‘piecemeal’ approach in evaluating the inter-related dynamics needed for innovation still going on, both at Government and Organizational level. We need to see this differently, to tackle it in a more comprehensive manner.

Innovation fitness terrian to travel

If you can imagine that you are looking out over a range of mountains and valleys and you need to determine your journey to get from one point to another as your goal. You need to understand your fitness and in this case your innovation fitness of what is needed to achieve your goals with the resources you have available or understanding what will bridge those gaps and transverse the challenges you face.

I will explain this some more in later blogs.

An opening CSF for innovation

IFD Smart Goals

A brief overview of critical success factors for innovation to check against.

  • The organization: structure of innovation processes to be explicit by treating innovation as a systematic process and continued ongoing process
  • Keep innovation separate from daily work routine, remove barriers, give accoutability
  • Set ambitious goals and a vision and combine these with small attainable steps
  • Focus on results, doing things for clear results, satisfying evaluation criteria
  • Learn from the innovation process for courage, acknowledge mistakes, continuous
  • Create a climate for creativity- trust, openness
  • Foster values that enhance innovation- core ideology, values, diversity
  • Break patterns, abandon accepeted truths and historical myths, contrarian thinking
  • Motivate personnel- good ideas, risks and achievements rewarded and recognised
  • Make people central to it all- the real power of innovation
  • Communicate about innovation- positive signals, setting example, commitment, faith.
  • Involve the top directly- word and deed, setting the example, protective shield
  • Search for and make use of opportunities- systematic inside and outside
  • Be customer-orientated- use as a source, the ‘burning platform’
  • The use and involvement of multiple stakeholders- open and flowing
  • Define the context, the clarity and prespective of the problem faced
  • Search to obtain the experience with the subject on hand
  • Pursue a range of paths and solutions
  • Evaluate problems, trigger ideas and access success
  • Commit sufficient resources, time and space.

All organizations talk about innovation, but so what?

IFD Blah Blah

All organizations talk about innovation and its growing importance but few succeed in actually doing it on a repeatable scale. So what does inhibit innovation? What would drive innovation success? What aspects of innovation are critical to have so innovative growth can be achieved?

Where should a company place its emphasis to gain both an improving impact on its performance and strengthen its innovation capabilities? There are countless questions that need asking but more importantly answering.

Innovation is complex and demanding

The difficulty for many is that innovation is a complex process that has many intangibles within the total mix to manage. Management today is far happier managing the ‘harder’ aspects of business, the more established, the more traditional ones that can be managed in efficient and effective ways to reduce complexity.

Continue reading “All organizations talk about innovation, but so what?”

Our Challenge is the need to build diverse innovation capability

IFD Diversity

Knowing what are the critical factors and there dependences for sustaining innovation success is vital 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.

So what are the challenges of the knowledge-driven economy that innovation needs to drive?

Continue reading “Our Challenge is the need to build diverse innovation capability”