Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence - Bringing my thinking and solutions to your business problems

Leadership Alignment Work Mat for making Innovation fully connected.

I believe the value of working the seven domains of this framework, named the Leadership Alignment Workmat has significant value within and across any organization. It brings innovation together, a unifying point for the activity and momentum of innovation to become central to the core of the business in its future investment and value impact.

The Leadership Alignment Workmat provides a unique examination of the executive’s role in innovation; it offers a framework that the organisation’s leadership can adopt to ensure linkages and synergies between strategy and innovation, innovation and capabilities, innovation and culture.

They often lack the communicating medium to help clarify and shape the innovation story to provide the guidance necessary for achieving that essential engagement and encouragement they would like to align organizational efforts required from innovation to the strategies envisioned.

Benefits of applying the Leadership Alignment Work Mat

From an investment in an executive work mat exercise, you receive four significant benefits. Continue reading “Leadership Alignment Work Mat for making Innovation fully connected.”

Mapping any innovation journey can be complicated. There is a fairly detailed journey needed to be undertaken for mapping out your future direction of innovation.

Let’s get straight into it and the process and sequence needed within any innovation journey.

Firstly you have to work through the Strategic Needs– this needs to cover the type of approaches, the scope and intent, the assessments of the required impact for the end customer and organizational value, the understanding and outlines of this becoming organizational-wide in its integrated needs.

This approach does need a systematic approach, continuous up-dated toolboxes and visible metrics and tracking. Lastly, to build and quickly test, adopt and scale as knowledge and understanding are gained.

Second, there is the need to build reference points for future innovation activities, so duplication and learning can be built into understanding. Here it is vital to have gained the continued support and engagement of high-level participation, where we recommend the Leadership Alignment work Mat approach, Continue reading “Mapping Out Your Innovating Way Forward”

Fitness Landscape Dynamics

Innovation is not so easy. There are so many dependencies that you need to work through. The importance of recognizing innovation needs a systematic approach becomes clear when you begin to work through all the needs and issues to understand and translate. Here are some thoughts:

By exploring and modelling the mutual dependencies, you get to see how the existing and alternative future innovation system will behave as you begin to map out and recognize the different emphasis points that make up your innovation system.

You can begin to identify the more important dynamic ones that require a more dedicated focus and place more of your resources behind. In contrast, others can evolve at their own pace or simply improve as they are far more dependent on the dynamic ones than you realized initially. These can get simply get ‘pulled along’ and rise equally in their performance. Continue reading “Fitness Landscape Dynamics for Innovation”

Innovation is vital to the energy system’s integration and operation design, and we need to further recognize its crucial role. I believe we undertake a radical transformation in the way we supply, transform, and use energy. This requires a profound transformation in technologies, systems, and infrastructure.

Innovation is made up of many enabling technologies that support energy. This complexity requires innovative approaches to be built in highly systematic ways. Its ultimate result is to offer innovation that can continually look for re-imagining new market designs and business models to stimulate the changes and solutions for our future energy transformation.

Innovation needs to be transformational, offer greater value than what it is replacing, show the real advantage, set out to achieve competitive gains and offer a higher level of sustainability, value and impact.

We need an innovative mantra for energy.

Energy is a vital part of any country’s ability to be competitive. Today half the world’s capital is invested in energy and its related infrastructure as it is the backbone of any industrial and urbanization strategy.

Our need is to keep pushing for discoveries, for experimentation, for demonstrating. We must nurture innovation, and we must continuously look for ways to facilitate its pathway. Continue reading “The crucial role Innovation must play in the Energy system”

Finding opportunities for Innovation and Growth is hard work. It is the value of having good, interactive, highly participative workshops that breaks much of those initial barriers to allow the hard work to begin more cohesively and collaboratively.

I believe any workshops design must meet your needs, push the thinking, and generate new returns in innovation understanding.

Boilerplate designs might look initially attractive, but knowing your needs, limitations, concerns, and ambitions can transform a workshop into one that lasts in the participant’s minds. They felt it was “clearly” designed for them.

Which end of the innovation spectrum do we need to go to?

Workshops can mean different things to different people. Find ones that are 100% focused on engaging with and accelerating innovation. They need a couple of simple rules.
Conducting ‘open’ dialogues or focused conversations should always have a sound context, so the contributions slowly build-out and hold real promise.
Discoveries can start with different ‘fields of enquiry’ to achieve different connections and deepen our perspectives.

A great book, written by Bill Sharpe, explaining the Three Horizons often comes to mind. I wrote about it here “Three Horizons- fields of future, full of foresight.”

Then I find the Divergent / Convergent approach in thinking as highly valuable.

We need to always challenge ourselves, and taking you through a set of lenses of discovery that go from ‘divergent to convergent‘ is important. Continue reading “Designing Unique Workshops is hard work”

Finding opportunities for Innovation and Growth is hard work.

It is the value of having good, interactive, highly participative workshops that breaks much of those initial barriers to allow the hard work to begin more cohesively and collaboratively.

I believe any workshops design must meet your needs, push the thinking, and generate new returns in innovation understanding.

Which end of the innovation spectrum do we need to go to?

Workshops can mean different things to different people. Find ones that are 100% focused on engaging with and accelerating innovation. They need a couple of simple rules.
Conducting ‘open’ dialogues or focused conversations should always have a sound context, so the contributions slowly build-out and hold real promise.
Discoveries can start with different ‘fields of enquiry’ to achieve different connections and deepen our perspectives.

A great book, written by Bill Sharpe, explaining the Three Horizons often comes to mind. I wrote about it here “Three Horizons- fields of future, full of foresight.”

Then I find the Divergent / Convergent approach in thinking as highly valuable.

We need to always challenge ourselves, and taking you through a set of lenses of discovery that go from ‘divergent to convergent‘ is important. Continue reading “Designing unique innovation workshops is hard work”

For innovation to be successful, the bottom line is the commitment and focus made for building the capabilities and competencies in innovation.

It is recognition that people make us the real value and ARE the innovation success equation in my opinion

So we must simply invest in them by focusing on the 3 C’s of developing people, these are Capabilities, Competency and Capability.

As we set about building and expanding capabilities, we need to consider:

How we can accelerate the uptake of innovation activity around the conditions provided through investing in them
The need to trigger engagement and achieve growing attainment of knowledge acquisition and dispersion skills- essential for collaborative innovation
Setting about building practices for greater synergies, relationships and networking conditions, for ongoing learning and absorptive capacity
Extracting the right cultural, design, climate and environmental conditions,
Placing increasing value on evolving the structures, processes and technology application
Investing in lessons learnt through validation and resolutions to challenges to build an ongoing adaptive capacity.
Recognizing people solve the critical bottlenecks and find solutions to overcome the constraints, they become increasingly motivated to find solutions and resolve gaps through their ability to be creative and inquisitive.
The ongoing building of capabilities and competencies clearly leads to a more sustaining and determined innovation future.

Increasing capacity through coaching

There are many benefits from having an intense course of one-on-one coaching, irrespective of the level of responsibility you have for innovation within your organization. Continue reading “Building competence and capacity to expand capabilities for innovation”

For innovation to be successful, the bottom line is the commitment and focus made for building the capabilities and competencies in innovation as people make us the real value and ARE the innovation success equation in my opinion,

So we must simply invest in them by focusing on the 3 C’s of developing peoples Capability, Competency and Capability.

As we set about to build and expand capabilities, we need to consider:

How we can accelerate the uptake of innovation activity around the conditions provided through investing in them
The need to trigger engagement and achieve growing attainment of knowledge acquisition and dispersion skills- essential for collaborative innovation
Setting about building practices for greater synergies, relationships and networking conditions, for ongoing learning and absorptive capacity
Extracting the right cultural, design, climate and environmental conditions,
Placing increasing value on evolving the structures, processes and technology application
Investing in lessons learnt through validation and resolutions to challenges to build an ongoing adaptive capacity.
Recognizing people solve the critical bottlenecks and find solutions to overcome the constraints, they become increasingly motivated to find solutions and resolve gaps through their ability to be creative and inquisitive.
The ongoing building of capabilities and competencies clearly leads to a more sustaining and determined innovation future.

Increasing capacity through coaching

There are many benefits from having an intense course of one-on-one coaching, irrespective of the level of responsibility you have for innovation within your organization. Continue reading “Building Capability and Capacity to Expand Capabilities for Innovation”

Achieving Growth and Impact from Business Ecosystems

Innovation has been central to my work in the past twenty years, in coaching, advisory, consulting, and mentoring roles building sustainability through evaluation, growth impact, and value creation alternatives. A depth in research and analysis, with a continued curiosity of change and exploring transitions, has built my understanding in thought leadership, and the recognition of the major shifts to ecosystem designs, to integrate into future business designs leading to focusing on how innovation impacts the Business Ecosystem in thinking and designs

Agility is deeply committed to your success for innovation.

“Our objectives are to help identify promising business opportunities, develop innovation expertise and competencies, create value, and grow competitive and profitable businesses alongside you by being 100% focused on providing dedicated innovative support.”

Agility Innovation Specialists offer a real “intensity in innovation and ecosystem building in thinking and design” at its core.

The focus on Ecosystems in design and thinking is central to the offerings made

We constantly aim:

– To find ways to disrupt the accepted, to reduce the barriers to innovation understanding, to achieve a greater adoption.
– To constantly challenge your current practices so as to provide a fresh, possible alternative set of outlooks and alter those perspectives that can potentially lead to increased value.
– Sometimes, we push into uncomfortable territory but always with a clear purpose of searching for improvement, not just for the sake of it.
– We seek out customers’ unmet needs and unexplored opportunities to give new diversity to any idea and accelerate its realization.
– We aim to strengthen your business’s core and extend its potential by exploring its adjacencies and white spaces.
– To provide clear superior results that will give you fresh growth options and more substantial innovation outcomes.

We welcome enquiries; please contact paul@agilityinnovation.com

In terms of reach and recognition, Agility’s client work has been broad and extensive across business and government sectors and globally.

Agility’s innovation work focuses on identifying today’s challenges and supporting the changes needed to build a sustainable future based on establishing a solid innovation core.

We look to provide leading-edge advice on building innovation capabilities.
The focus is all about bringing new forms of innovation competency into the world of everyday thinking through framework designs.
We look to deliver a clear impact and returns on the investments made.
We deliver a broad, more holistic understanding of what is required in innovation, unique to each client.

Client work, the industry area and geographical focus

We build frameworks that reflect today’s business needs and realities

Sector consulting experience has included advising into:

Electronic Contract Manufacturers, Telecommunications, Utility providers, E-business ventures, Restaurants & Food Service, Retailers, SME service advisors, Executive Recruitment firms, Government Statutory Boards, Publishing, Consumer Products, Alternative Energy providers, Not-for-Profit Institutions, Integrated Facility Management and Logistic & Supply Chain integrators.

Part of the practice has been a subcontractor of choice or consulting associate to other solution providers, often in back-office roles providing the specialised inputs critical parts of innovation, resource development and change management.

Geographic focus:

This has been mainly in Asia and Europe, but working with many US Corporations within these regions as well as large Asian and European organizations. Paul Hobcraft has lived and worked for 15 years in Asia and initially consulted and advised under an associate practice and then moved back to Switzerland to build and develop different networks and experiences all evolving out of the innovation focus.

Today Paul is based in Ticino, Switzerland and continues to work where the client requires their solutions globally to be designed and executed but increasingly recognizes that staying “put” and working more remotely is saving valuable time, money and travel but achieving a new engagement model that delivers, often, a more focused impact through technology touchpoints and targetted outcomes “*on-line” and at clients adaptable needs.

Paul Hobcraft can be contacted at +41 91 751 4350 or by email: paul@agilityinnovation.com