I had not recognized the incredible power of “orchestration” needed in innovation as much as I should have done. Of course it was there, actually all around us, going on all the time but it was not as ‘loud and clear’ in my thinking as it should have been. The blind spot had been my focus on pursuing this continual need to organize around innovation within an organization. Although this is as essential today there has been continued and rapid shifts taking place outside the walls and I was not capturing the dynamics of this well enough .
When we begin to want to orchestrate across external innovation networks we not only need to know ourselves extremely well, we also need to know what others can bring and what is missing. Networks are dynamic, the flow of knowledge, of capabilities and competencies all need somehow capturing. Recognizing this shift in my thinking, allowed me to pick up the baton again and begin to conduct all the different fragments and pull them together, into a different result.
I learnt also that innovation needs this growing orchestration, due to this increasing move from firm-centric to network-centric innovation. In my understanding of a orchestrator, he needs to manage the tempo, knowing where and when to cue in the different players (learning) and to inject the intensity into the performance. I was back on my journey recognizing the different passages and movements I’d been on, where all contributing into a final result. “Something” was coming together and I need to work through the new ‘score’ being played out.
We need to learn to identify, assimilate and exploit far more than ever, the value of knowing your innovation fitness, your dynamics and the terrain you wish to traverse in new innovation activity becomes even more critical. To create and to extract does clearly need to understand the what, why, where, when and how it needs to go about this.
The orchestrator needs to orchestrate.
To do this you must orchestrate the capabilities, to purposefully build what is needed to deliver the final result. I have reconfigured my thinking around what will influence the evolution leading from internal innovation capabilities to a whole ‘network’ of these. It still lies in how you purposefully build these capabilities and competencies up. Orchestration is fundamentally dynamic, full of uncertainties but the need is still to connect the parts.
The four dimensions for building capability to innovate are at the individual level, within teams, within the organization and within the dynamic set of networks needed at given times to solve innovation challenges. These capabilities need to possess mobility, appropriability, certain stability and the willingness to learn and build on the existing dynamics. Internal capabilities still need building but we also must work to identify those complementary capabilities across a fluid set of stakeholders to deliver a more complex innovation challenge.
Orchestration has for me become very important to my ongoing work on the dynamic innovation capabilities for recognizing your innovation fitness landscape and the gaps. These become even more of a challenge when different perspectives and competencies enter the mix.
We urgently need to understand the ‘dynamics of innovation’ even more. What is the local maximum, what can we work upon in transition, what we need to bring in for any future co-creation and what needs working upon within specific networks within the innovation capabilities and capacities needed to be applied.
The dynamic view of orchestrating is needed
The orchestrating of open innovation challenges is dynamic and we increasingly need to know the critical factors and their dependencies for delivering a collaborative innovation success. We need to not just know the appropriate resources, we need to work on the skills, processes, routines, organizational structure and disciplines that enable firms to build, employ and orchestrate intangible assets relevant to satisfying customer needs and which cannot be replicated by competitors, that delivers the new innovation needed through collaboration efforts.
