Each organization needs to know its Innovation Fitness Landscape- why?
There is a pressing need for a firm is to consistently build and reconfigure internal and external competencies and capabilities to address rapidly changing environments. It is the mastering of this ability to achieve new, more innovative forms in rapid changing market conditions that will enable certain organizations to emerge as the winners of the innovation race.
This view requires a more ‘dynamic’ set of capabilities. Often the question becomes one of “which are the critical ones to focus upon to improve the chance of greater success?
Knowing your fitness landscape does provide a good understanding of your existing position and set of capabilities and can ‘point’ you towards the ones that you need to have to move towards to have in place to improve your innovation capacity and achieve closer to your goals.
Survival of the fittest dominates
Each organization has limited resources, it is to know where to focus your limited resources to maximise your abilities to deliver better innovation. The key is to map out those current innovation capabilities to the tasks (and aspirations) at hand and identify the opportunity spaces and gaps that need to be filled to match aspiration with abilities, so as to deliver against the stated strategic need. It does seem Darwin seemingly raises his head in much of what we do to simply keep up and adapt. So we do need to understand innovation in more of its entirety not only to survive but to thrive.
