Innovation Thinking and Resources - Exploring Dynamics Within Innovation Landscapes

Correcting an innovation oversight sometimes hits you hard!

By @paul4innovating March 16, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, innovation execution delivery, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

I’ve had one of those weeks where a certain realization took hold, something that had been nagging away at you suddenly surfaces and slaps you in the face. Ouch!

I have just completed my own gap analysis on how I have explained the Executive Innovation Work Mat methodology and its value. It actually was a bit of an eye-opener. I was surprised in this audit of all associated posts, articles and papers written by myself or in collaboration with Jeffrey Phillips, that there were some very glaring gaps in my posts on explaining this methodology.

The Seven Components that make up the Executive Innovation Work Mat

The Innovation Work Mat has seven components or domains

What was crazy here is the fact I have the research, the component parts all worked through, structured and being used in actual engagements to prompt the essential discussions, yet I had not been publishing these enough through my posts to underpin the methodology.

I had been missing essential domain component messages that are the very essence of why you need to work around the entire work mat as essential. I was missing the opportunity to publically talk about ALL the parts as it is the combining of these that does provide its value as an integrated approach to innovation that can cascade throughout the organization.

The Role of Governance needed in Innovation

By @paul4innovating March 14, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, innovation execution delivery, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Later this month a book I have looked forward too, is finally being launched.

It is called “Innovation Governance: How Top Management Organizes and Mobilizes for Innovation” written by Jean-Philippe Deschamps & Beebe Nelson. Jean-Philippe Deschamps is emeritus Professor of Technology and Innovation Management at IMD in Lausanne (Switzerland).

Innovation Governance is promising to provide a comprehensive framework to help top management develop the overarching values, policies and initiatives needed for a corporate innovation constitution.

The authors are providing a framework for encouraging and focusing innovation by explaining what innovation governance is, the various models for governance and their advantages and disadvantages, how to assess and improve governance practices, and behavioural tactics for maximizing the effectiveness of governance.

Describing the future by using the business narrative

By @paul4innovating March 13, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Fresh thinking, Innovation strategy, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

In business, the future narrative is becoming vital. We all should care about the future and it becomes so important for us all to identify or not, as this gives us our identification.

I have found that narratives are becoming increasingly important to explain ‘things’. I’m re-learning this ‘art’ to tell a compelling story.

Our stories can combine much, communities can identify or reject, we can begin to explain complex stories by presenting a well-designed narrative that presents the arguments. It can explain the connections and outline the issues, both in terms of risk and opportunity.

I think business narratives will become essential for our organizations to use to explain where they are and what they see as their future.

A good business narrative should fill a real knowledge gap

Understanding the dynamics within your innovation system

By @paul4innovating March 11, 2014Capabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Fitness Landscaping Regimes7 Comments

Recognizing Dynamics and Building Innovation Fitness

The work of David Teece is hugely influential on exploring dynamic capabilities. It was my reading of one of his early papers, published in 1997 (with Gary Pisano and Amy Shuen) that got me started down the dynamics path and my quest to identify the innovation landscape required by each organization to become innovation fit.

Teece’s concept of dynamic capabilities is a theory about the source of corporate agility: the capacity (1) to sense and shape opportunities and threats, (2) to seize opportunities by mobilizing your resources to capture new value from those opportunities, and (3) to maintain competitiveness through enhancing, combining, protecting, and, when necessary, reconfiguring the business enterprise’s intangible and tangible assets by transforming them for continuous renewal. This makes organizations potentially dynamic.

Recognizing and adapting to today’s and tomorrows challenges.

The challenge is how to position or reposition today’s resources for tomorrow.

Knowing the Value within your Business Model is Vital

By @paul4innovating March 9, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Foster Performance, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Last year I provided a guest post to Patrick Stähler’s Business Model Innovation blog and wanted to add this to my own site as I think it does place the focus on finding value within any business model design.

I think Patrick’s business model lends itself to this constant focus on value. Patrick runs fluidminds, based in Zürich, Switzerland. fluidminds helps its customers to think by challenging existing business rules, offer structured thinking and different perspectives on the strategy process and support the execution.

Patrick wrote his thesis about Business Model innovation in the digital age and from this emerged his unique ‘take ‘on working through the business model. Patrick has been dealing since 1997 with questions around how the web changes Business Models and how Business Model innovation should and could look in the digital economy.

fluidminds wants to create new businesses and to shape industries with business model innovation, with a large part of Patrick’s practice centered on German speaking markets but he has consulted across numerous English speaking ones as well.

So in my guest post I put forward this three point view of value.

Taking on those innovation hills is never easy

By @paul4innovating March 8, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Foster Performance, Innovation strategy, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Following on from my last post suggesting the way to move innovation forward, it was to ‘take the different innovation hills, one at a time, for innovation advancement” I used a military metaphor of “taking the hills”.

So what are the hills we need to take?

There are plenty of innovation hills to attack but here are ten suggestions that would advance the cause of innovation and establish its territorial importance in the organization somewhat.

Some hills maybe on first glance, seem not so important but they all move towards setting up the winning conditions for innovation to become a core within organizations. Some are sending clear signals of intent; others show the fighting commitment necessary to take that hill because it is strategically important.

Hill one is by abandoning quarterly reporting

Taking the hills, one at a time, for innovation advancement

By @paul4innovating March 7, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Foster Performance, gaining innovation momentum, innovation execution delivery, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Taking the hill. Pfc. John J. Allen of Company E in the 25th Infantry Division leads his men in attack on the west central front in Korea, March 30, 1951.

How do we move innovation forward? We need to see this as a battle of hearts and minds, of overcoming dogma and fixed mindsets, using skirmishes to advance the innovation advancement. We need to break out of entrenched positions and lead innovation forward.

Many people feel innovation is an uncomfortable place, it often is at the edge, it deals in both opportunity and risk, it is uncertain to commit to joining the innovation battle. Sadly the majority working within our organizations do not understand innovation, it is too intangible, it seems shrouded in mysteries, yet it offers challenge, excitement and satisfaction. To achieve ‘something’ is highly motivating.

We firstly need to mobilize around innovation

To mobilize the organizations troops you have to give them objectives, they need to identify and be given a clear understanding of the ‘cause and its effect’. Over time they can recognize the positive effects and begin to understand the consequences if they don’t join in and engage.

Let me use a military metaphor, in war for this post.

The role senior executives must fill for innovation success

By @paul4innovating March 3, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Foster Performance, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Innovation strategy, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Jeffrey Phillips of Ovo Innovation and I wrote a White Paper, we called our foundation document, on “Accelerating or inhibiting innovation – understand your role for innovation success”. You can read the full paper here

We strongly believe there is a real Innovation leadership gap

My last article “Developing talent to drive innovation” was questioning the spending of new funds on developing talent for innovation, unless the organization and its leadership is not clear on what it is specifically looking for, or how it is prepared to back their words with specific actions beyond ‘just’ new funding levels, then this might not be money well spent.

Developing talent to drive innovation

By @paul4innovating March 2, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, gaining innovation momentum, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

I recently participated in a survey for APQC that was looking to identify the hot topics within product development and innovation. One or two hot spots surprised me, others less so.

In the round-up of results almost two-thirds of survey respondents have placed refining the identification of customer needs and remaining competitive in terms of profit at the top of their product development agendas. I like the increasing emphasis on identifying customer needs

Among the potential research areas respondents were asked about, they felt that developing talent to drive innovation was the most important. The second one was around rapid product development: How to Move Products to Market Faster.

The one that really caught my eye was organizations have allocated the most funds to improvement in developing talent to drive innovation. This is heartening but also a worry.

Facing the future or staying locked in the slow lane of the past?

By @paul4innovating February 28, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, gaining innovation momentum, Leading innovation, Polymers, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Today we face unprecedented change; organizations are being hit on multiple sides, often by a bewildering set of forces to make them feel the immediate need is to go back into themselves, to be more inward than looking out and being open to facing the future. There is this feeling today of being battered. Organizations are feeling the full force of the winds of business and global change.

Stopping, reflecting and then moving on.

Organizations are grappling with how to navigate through an unprecedented set of early 21st century challenges. How can they adjust to a more open and transparent world, a more fluid and adaptive one, that needs to be replacing the one we have been operating within all of the last century? One that seems to work no more as its very foundations seem to be crumbling. Organizations are in a period of relearning and understanding these ‘new’ forces at work.