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

Act effectively amid uncertainty

There is a consistent need to keep looking around us; on what is going on, what has happened in the past, what is alongside us, what might be ahead and the people and resources we have available. This is taught to anyone who wants to be well equipped in any mountainous area. We need to be prepared as best we can in business and be ready to anticipate different scenarios and predictions- to be ready to be more adaptive and agile. Innovation requires that.

It is knowing this so called innovation terrain, understanding the opportunities or possibilities around us along with appreciating the time pressures, positions both internally and externally in the market that provide us much of the context of why we need to innovate in a certain way. Knowing the intensity of your innovation challenge gives you a better appreciation of what is needed to resolve these challenges- your innovation fitness.

In our understanding of the often ‘diverse’ set of challenges you have to overcome and knowing what is available to you and what you need to find to bridge any gaps becomes essential. The obtaining of insights for innovation enables you to relocate or locate the resources that are capable to be combined to traverse the landscape (or challenge) and innovate better.

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An opening CSF for innovation

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?

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?”

The Vital Attributes for an Innovation Organization

Understanding what is needed for innovation- unlocking the mysteries

* Innovation organizations tend to be more decentralized, more informal, minimally stratified or layered and more generalist than specialized.

* They have cultures that value independent thinking, risk taking and ongoing learning.

* They are tolerant of failure and they value diversity.

* Open communication is reinforced and there is a high degree of trust and respect between individuals that collaborate.

These attributes should include, but not limited too:

Organizations have a clear vision
Innovative organizations change because they see a better way and not because they have to change
Innovation organizations are always on the lookout for new products, new markets and new ways of doing things
Innovation organizations value substance over form- putting the ideas to work
They build creatively and innovation into the fabric of the company
They have organizational structures that are more often team-based than hierarchical
Innovation organizations tend to operate through open communications rather than through formal processes
Innovation organisations do not personalize conflict
Innovation organizations focus on who you know as well as on what you know
Innovation organizations appreciate individuality and diversity
Innovation organizations encourage fun at work- engaged, enlivened, fully participative and empowered
They reward curiosity and working smarter
Innovation organizations do not believe in the answer and allows space for wondering, thinking and reflection and numerous ways to get to a solution
Innovation organizations encourage people to bend the rules, being different and having pride if they emerge with adding new value to the organization.
Innovation organizations tolerate errors and avoid punishment where creativity is appreciated
Innovation organizations finally encourage behaviours that allow for thought, time for incubation, openness to wonder and sometimes irreverence that can elicit different, creative reasoning that wants to be measured on creativity and innovativeness.

Adapting fitness landscapes with your innovation objectives

There are a number of aspects we can look at initially.

This is helping us to shape the journey, to place it in context. It lays out the theory to the journey we are about to undertake.

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Our Challenge is the need to build diverse innovation capability

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?

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Moving Up the Path Towards Innovation Fitness

So how do we become innovation fit?

Can you imagine standing on top of a mountain, looking out across a vast expanse of nothing but mountains and valleys stretching out before you. If you squint hard enough you can just make out that somewhere in the hazy distance, the end point of your travels, towards that much needed innovation understanding, made up of many different dynamics that make you and your organization that much fitter to compete in today’s challenging world.

Clearly while you are on top of this mountain you feel exhilarated to have even got up to this point. To even get to this point you have already made a decision that you and your organization would become an innovation one and needs to look beyond what you have to what is possible.

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A recognition that innovation is a complex adaptive system

Maybe I’m taking on more than I can chew here but I’m going to attempt to explain why innovation can be so complex and requires an adaptive system.

I apologise if it does not work for you, or you simply just give up on this but I am going to try to explain innovation as a complex adaptive system.

Why- I like the pain involved! I’m certainly not in any shape or form an expert or even that much of a student of complex systems, and what it fully consists of, but I do need to explore this more, and a little shared pain helps in this as I go.

This issue is one that I consistently come across many references to innovation being a complex system. The trouble is I’ve never been fully clear on what determines the make up a complex system for innovation. I’m not sure anyone does for complex systems either!

So my aim here is to establish a direct and clear set of links across innovation and complexity without it involving me in ploughing through incredibly ‘dense’ academic papers on this subject. Continue reading “A recognition that innovation is a complex adaptive system”

Shifting paradigms, refreezing the organization for innovation

I would like to continue on “unfreezing the middle” for innovation to really take hold and have a greater momentum in organizations, we often have to unfreeze them. Largely it is about our ability to unlock those ‘frozen innovation moments or the assets associated with them.’

To radically redesign the approach to innovation that today is constantly occurring in ‘discreet parcels’ of innovation activity within organizations. It is this ‘selective’ approach I certainly believe needs changing.

To achieve this I believe the middle manager in organizations needs to make some significant changes within their perspectives of ‘how’ innovation must fit within the design of their organization.

This will allow them to achieve a fundamentally different organizational state than many seemingly need but perhaps are stuck with existing designs at present.

Perhaps they are not seeing a different perscribed pathway to take- the innovation pathway suggested here http://bit.ly/dnCj1m and built upon here http://bit.ly/ikgR4f can serve as thoughts

Innovation in organizations does need fresh perspectives.

Jeffrey Phillips argues in his recent blog that “middle managers need new perspectives, new skills and new directions”. “We need to unfreeze the middle so the rest of the organization can adapt and change. Only then can innovation become what is needed it to be”- taken from his blog: “From smooth and steady to rough and ready”. (http://bit.ly/OVsuX)

The question is how to unfreeze what we do today and relearn? Continue reading “Shifting paradigms, refreezing the organization for innovation”

Unfreezing the middle, seeing a different innovating prospective

This past week we had a #innochat tweet session(www.innochat.com) around Jeffrey Phillip’s book “Relentless Innovation”( http://amzn.to/xXoHof ).

The chat was framed around a set of questions here (http://bit.ly/Awvh5E ) but basically the premise of Jeffrey’s thinking was “can it be possible to shift from business as usual (BAU) to innovation business as usual”?

He suggests that one of the most significant challenges for innovation is the fact that many firms have spent years, if not decades, creating business models and operating processes that are exceptionally efficient and effective but neglect the essential part that innovation plays.

Equally the middle manager is so focused on the delivery of short term results through effective organization and pursuing efficiencies they have little ‘slack’ within the system to learn and build innovation into it.

I would possibly argue the very people that we are expecting to manage the ‘dynamics’ within organizations, the Middle Managers, are seeking the very opposite- doing everything possible to keep it as stable and consistent as it can be.

So how can this change? Continue reading “Unfreezing the middle, seeing a different innovating prospective”