Achieving innovation fitness is a journey- to get there we often have to manage the switchbacks as we build our capabilities and capacities to innovate.

1. Getting Started – Understanding the Needs & Imperatives of Innovation Fitness

• Why we must travel this critical path for Innovation.
• The meaning of dynamic capabilities and innovation fitness landscapes
• Merging  the theory with practical reality to produce new outcomes and positive results.
• Focusing on resources and performance – why is this important
• The problem is knowing what we have and what we really need

2. The Fuel of Innovation Performance – the dynamics of innovation

• A sharper, clearer focus on innovation resources to meet strategic need
• What is known about resources to sustain, enhance performance
• Knowing and aligning  your strategic criteria – for sound innovation approaches
• Getting innovation within the right context of your business
• Moving your resources in the right direction

3. Getting even more specific – quantification and qualification

• Recognizing the building of scale, change rates and dynamics that happen over time and why we need to constantly build our innovation capabilities.
• Developing the resources to meet the need – structured, focused, clarified by bringing out the necessary discussion.
• An illustrative scenario for a directional innovation fitness landscape map
• Recognizing resources can come beyond the firm and bringing these in successfully. Managing within a more open environment.
• Achieving  mutual dependencies to support; recognizing the hindering ones
• Being aware of  the impact of different scenarios in the management of innovation

4. Building the Innovation Fitness Machine – reinforcing feedback, identifying needs

• Recognizing the current status, spotting emerging patterns, seeing spaces and gaps and identifying solutions.
• Beginning the ‘adaptive walk’ to get to higher fitness points needed to compete.
• Clarifying the complementary resources, looking to embed new routines quickly and set up follow through approaches.
• Introducing natural tensions into the system to trigger ‘step change’
• Resource dependence climate, culture, diversity, intensity and uniqueness
• Reinforcing feedback – watching for dangers, managing the machine capacity, removing the brakes selectively
• Shifting your resources need not deplete or force other people to compete for them – working through the tensions within teams and silos.
• Matching resource dynamics with the innovation value chain & life cycle stages
• Simulation modelling the ‘what ifs’ and ‘why’

5. The Strategic Architecture – designing the system to perform as needed

• The step process for designing and executing the architecture design
• Diagnosing performance challenges and road blocks – resolving, moving on
• Lining up the solutions is not a linear process and needs careful management
• Addressing the effects of intangibles in the Strategic Architecture.

6. The Hard Face of Soft(er) factors – the hidden power of intangible resources

• Clarifying the impact of the intangibles and recognizing time, climate and conditions are significant contributors to innovation activities.
• The different rivalry types: internal and external, inter department, inter projects and working through resolutions to these.
• Reflecting feelings and expectations, addressing all the different needs
• Measuring the tougher parts of intellectual capital
• The real value of your intangible resources
• Recognizing the value of hidden innovation and spotting its occurrence

7. Entering into Competitive Battle – the Dynamics of Rivalry, the Uniqueness of You

• Recognizing, developing, capturing, transforming, avoiding and out – manoeuvring
• Your point of choosing what, where, how and when to compete.
• Building capabilities that are unique to you and hard to replicate
• Building sustainability into the innovation equation as ongoing
• Extending the turf, exploiting the situation, pushing beyond, seeking partners.

8. Building and Testing Capabilities to Perform

• Measuring capabilities through different fitness levels and scale.
• Learning to build capabilities as ‘ongoing’ and evolving for changing needs
• Re-Structuring the process for dealing with the dynamics of change
• Knowing the points of impact on performance to enable recognition and reality
• Managing innovation performance progressively across the spectrum of business need through testing and extending capability learning.
• Building from personal to team to organizational learning in measured steps
• Recognizing the role of leadership, achieving strategic alignment and working on broadening out innovation competence at different organizational levels.

9. Keeping the innovation fitness wheels turning, keeping your eyes on the road

• Resolution of conflicting goals, control and structure
• Dissecting conflicting positions, resolving impasse
• Knowing the limits of human engagement
• Goals, controls and measurements can dominate and strangle
• Keeping the measurements simple and clear
• Managing innovation as a critical strategic resource
• Merging the results into a greater alignment to Strategy and Approaches

The end result is looking to generate your fitness landscape

As you can see this is applying a very comprehensive approach, a fairly ‘intensive’ one.  This might alter individually after some clear piloting, learning and experimentation undertaken.  Building innovation capabilities takes time; they are complex, highly structured and multi-dimensional. Any structured approach to tackling innovation takes time and considerable commitment.

The post 9 Stages for building innovation fitness first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I felt it was time to make a restatement.

Let me restate what I am focusing upon here, in this work and why it has a separate, dedicated website to allow me to evolve and share in this discovery and thinking through journey.

So my hypothesis, hopefully covered off in this initial explanation is made on the basis of growing research and evidence, as an investigative point for further work-to-be-done in thinking and constructing around the plotting or mapping out specific innovation landscapes that deliver the innovation capabilities needed.

This work is now at a point it needs additional help to take this out further in a testing and experimental environment and I am looking for one or more ‘willing’ organizations to be the pilot for this to validate and further improve from the learning.

The Challenge I’m trying to Solve

Knowing what are the critical factors for innovation and their dependence for sustaining innovation success are becoming a vital necessity 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.

We need to recognize Resources are scarce and need constant renewal

We still don’t understand the ‘dynamics’ of innovation, the interdependency of the parts. Which parts have greater impact, which are not so important? Innovation is still not treated company-wide in a holistic way as recognition of the dependencies is poorly understood. This is what needs to change.

What and where do you place your resources to gain greater impact? What is important to recognize as needing additional ‘weight and focus’, what capability and competencies need to have a stronger emphasis and why? How can we identify these, make the innovation process more dynamic yet these embed constantly as routines? What would happen if we ignore certain innovation aspects, what would give greater impact to our business?

Why do I think Fitness Landscapes will help?

The pressing need for a firm is to integrate, build and reconfigure internal and external competencies/ capabilities to address rapidly changing environments and its ability to achieve new, more innovative forms in market position.

This calls for more ‘dynamic capability” to be achieved, to be available and constantly being built up as they are in flux and change. The basic question that needs to be addressed is “what is our dynamic capabilities and more importantly which critical ones should we focus upon to improve our capabilities and competences to innovate?”

The solution I am looking for offers Innovation Fitness landscapes by provide the understanding of the existing position and ‘point towards’ where to place your resource to improve your innovative capacity to adjust and deliver the capabilities and capacities to meet the challenges on hand. Equally to project and forecast the gaps needing solutions to bridge.

Fitness Landscapes as a solution has its roots in Darwin.

In any competitive situation, the survival of the fittest dominates (Darwinian). Knowing your innovation fitness is essential in this race. The question often raised is where do we focus our limited resource to achieve a better fitness to be successful at innovation?

Mapping out innovation capabilities and capacities

Mapping out your innovation capabilities to the task at hand enables you to understand and relate to what is needed. Innovation Fitness Landscapes identify the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts and apply the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain and move towards greater and more successful innovation outcomes. The greater the ‘fitness’ and peaks obtained transforms your landscape potential into accelerating opportunities and increasing tangible outcomes.

These critical factors that are identified give higher value potential or ‘peaks’ that are more valuable to your needs. The more ‘rugged or diverse’ the landscape can also determine the greater fitness needed for a higher rate of innovation. The strength of the peaks in these landscapes illustrates how intense the innovation challenge is, and the number of critical peaks shows how diverse it potentially is to have resolved as contributing factors.
The ability to identifying the emerging patterns provides the need to act and invest, you begin to make adaptive walks, so as to move you to the higher fitness points where innovation viability is enhanced and understanding is needed to be in place so as to resolve the challenges faced. Greater fitness equates to more value creation potential. The ability to inter-couple landscape entities and exploit individual interactions alters your dynamics to innovate and improve repeatable cycle times and provides for increasing options to explore.

Moving towards a solution

I want to take this (pioneering) work out for testing and experimenting, to calibrate its framework so it delivers a strong rigor and validation to take out and scale further.  This is why I believe I am at a point of needing some invested time by a client or two to work on this with me in this testing, validation environment.

The solution is a framework that shows promise but it needs to go further from theory into practice. What are the mutual dependencies, how the innovation ‘system’ behaves, what are its more important impact factors which are weaker and what should be considered in the ‘best’ innovation environment?

The key is to know what are those capability points that are dynamic and highly relevant to the delivery of innovation, and dampening down the ones that are less so. A greater innovation fitness equates to more value creation potential as clear distinctive capabilities emerge as points of greater value, these are the dynamic points of your innovation need.

The post Restating the Value Proposition of Innovation Fitness first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Achieving innovation fitness is a journey- to get there we often have to manage the switchbacks as we build our capabilities and capacities to innovate.

1. Getting Started – Understanding the Needs & Imperatives of Innovation Fitness

• Why we must travel this critical path for Innovation.
• The meaning of dynamic capabilities and innovation fitness landscapes
• Merging  the theory with practical reality to produce new outcomes and positive results.
• Focusing on resources and performance – why is this important
• The problem is knowing what we have and what we really need

2. The Fuel of Innovation Performance – the dynamics of innovation

• A sharper, clearer focus on innovation resources to meet strategic need
• What is known about resources to sustain, enhance performance
• Knowing and aligning  your strategic criteria – for sound innovation approaches
• Getting innovation within the right context of your business
• Moving your resources in the right direction

3. Getting even more specific – quantification and qualification

• Recognizing the building of scale, change rates and dynamics that happen over time and why we need to constantly build our innovation capabilities.
• Developing the resources to meet the need – structured, focused, clarified by bringing out the necessary discussion.
• An illustrative scenario for a directional innovation fitness landscape map
• Recognizing resources can come beyond the firm and bringing these in successfully. Managing within a more open environment.
• Achieving  mutual dependencies to support; recognizing the hindering ones
• Being aware of  the impact of different scenarios in the management of innovation

4. Building the Innovation Fitness Machine – reinforcing feedback, identifying needs

• Recognizing the current status, spotting emerging patterns, seeing spaces and gaps and identifying solutions.
• Beginning the ‘adaptive walk’ to get to higher fitness points needed to compete.
• Clarifying the complementary resources, looking to embed new routines quickly and set up follow through approaches.
• Introducing natural tensions into the system to trigger ‘step change’
• Resource dependence climate, culture, diversity, intensity and uniqueness
• Reinforcing feedback – watching for dangers, managing the machine capacity, removing the brakes selectively
• Shifting your resources need not deplete or force other people to compete for them – working through the tensions within teams and silos.
• Matching resource dynamics with the innovation value chain & life cycle stages
• Simulation modelling the ‘what ifs’ and ‘why’

5. The Strategic Architecture – designing the system to perform as needed

• The step process for designing and executing the architecture design
• Diagnosing performance challenges and road blocks – resolving, moving on
• Lining up the solutions is not a linear process and needs careful management
• Addressing the effects of intangibles in the Strategic Architecture.

6. The Hard Face of Soft(er) factors – the hidden power of intangible resources

• Clarifying the impact of the intangibles and recognizing time, climate and conditions are significant contributors to innovation activities.
• The different rivalry types: internal and external, inter department, inter projects and working through resolutions to these.
• Reflecting feelings and expectations, addressing all the different needs
• Measuring the tougher parts of intellectual capital
• The real value of your intangible resources
• Recognizing the value of hidden innovation and spotting its occurrence

7. Entering into Competitive Battle – the Dynamics of Rivalry, the Uniqueness of You

• Recognizing, developing, capturing, transforming, avoiding and out – manoeuvring
• Your point of choosing what, where, how and when to compete.
• Building capabilities that are unique to you and hard to replicate
• Building sustainability into the innovation equation as ongoing
• Extending the turf, exploiting the situation, pushing beyond, seeking partners.

8. Building and Testing Capabilities to Perform

• Measuring capabilities through different fitness levels and scale.
• Learning to build capabilities as ‘ongoing’ and evolving for changing needs
• Re-Structuring the process for dealing with the dynamics of change
• Knowing the points of impact on performance to enable recognition and reality
• Managing innovation performance progressively across the spectrum of business need through testing and extending capability learning.
• Building from personal to team to organizational learning in measured steps
• Recognizing the role of leadership, achieving strategic alignment and working on broadening out innovation competence at different organizational levels.

9. Keeping the innovation fitness wheels turning, keeping your eyes on the road

• Resolution of conflicting goals, control and structure
• Dissecting conflicting positions, resolving impasse
• Knowing the limits of human engagement
• Goals, controls and measurements can dominate and strangle
• Keeping the measurements simple and clear
• Managing innovation as a critical strategic resource
• Merging the results into a greater alignment to Strategy and Approaches

The end result is looking to generate your fitness landscape

As you can see this is applying a very comprehensive approach, a fairly ‘intensive’ one.  This might alter individually after some clear piloting, learning and experimentation undertaken.  Building innovation capabilities takes time; they are complex, highly structured and multi-dimensional. Any structured approach to tackling innovation takes time and considerable commitment.

The post 9 Stages for building innovation fitness first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Just begin to work through these ‘thoughts’ to begin to evaluate the value of knowing your innovation fitness so as to find out what makes up your distinct dynamic capabilities:

• By firstly mapping out your innovation capabilities to the task at hand enables you to understand and relate to what is needed – we call that the context for innovation.

• Innovation Fitness Landscapes helps in this task by identifying the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts‐ and apply the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain or challenges you are facing.

• The greater understanding of the ‘fitness points needed’ can transform your innovation landscape potential, or in business parlance, achieve your goal.

• Achieving this fitness accelerates your opportunities into final tangible outcomes. Here is a little bit of the theory:  you look for those critical factors that will give higher value potential or ‘peaks’ that are more valuable to your needs.

• The more ‘rugged’ the landscape, the tougher the innovation challenge, can also determines the greater fitness for the rate of innovation needed.

• The height of the peaks in these landscapes, the greater value placed upon them, illustrates how intense the innovation challenge is, and the number of critical peaks shows how diverse its potentially is to then provide the appropriate resources.

• The ability to identifying the emerging patterns provides the need to act and invest, making adaptive even exploratory walks to provide the appropriate resources needed.

• Understanding these will enable you  to move you to the higher fitness points where innovation viability is enhanced and needed to be so as to resolve the challenges faced.

• You need to experiment, to take these exploratory ‘walk’s to realize the potential and learn how to scale accordingly.

All I’m doing here is prompting you to ask questions. We can discuss ways to tackle and resolve the questions this can arise and apply solutions to build your distinct innovation capabilities to offer you a more sustaining innovation future. Intersted?

The post Do you know where your distinct innovation capabilities come from? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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.

I focus on the three horizon framework as this points an organization towards a ‘possible’ tomorrow and then they have to position their resources to ‘ready’ themselves.

Today organizations need to (radically) break free from copying and evaluating to markets in similar ways to their competitors. The difficulties to make this change in thinking is caught up in existing practice, organizations are often ‘wedded’ to best practice, want to stick with the learnt practices that have served them well in delivering particular outcomes in the past.

Best practices are ordinary practices, they dampen down the uniqueness and difficult to imitate ones that have the real dynamic potential to set the organization apart, give them a possible distinct advantage.

Shifting the “way we do things around here” is really hard

We need to think differently, we need to build into the culture of our organizations a more “evolutionary fitness,” so as market conditions change, the capabilities adjust and adapt accordingly. This comes back to David Teece’s “sensing, seizing and transforming” of the managerial activities to accomplish this.

Analysing changes taking place and linking these to then adapting the resources has not been as well ‘connected’ in organizations as they should. I have argued often if we don’t align innovation and strategy, how can we build our capabilities? We fail to make many internal connections and this is where knowing the dynamics within the system will significantly help.

Are we protecting our critical resources of building ongoing capabilities?

It often surprises me about the sheer amount of effort put into capturing and protecting intellectual property. Of course any IP needs protecting but it allows you a limited position, in time, in market opportunity yet often it sparks off a second round of innovation to circumnavigate this by your competitors.

Much of your success to hold your position or to take your IP further is totally dependent on building your capabilities (to innovate). You need to actively work at building your internal propriety aspect, your internal or ecosystem capabilities. To do this they must become dynamic, ever evolving and adapting to changing conditions.

You have to invest to understand how the underlying system works

Innovation is different, it challenges much of the existing routines and systems. To integrate innovation into your systems and structures you should firstly map what you have, recognize what you don’t and seek ways to bridge any gaps. But you have to know what you are trying to achieve strategically through innovation and most do not.

This requires a fair amount of work. To do this you need to map your existing capabilities for innovation, and then explore the evolving landscape you think ‘makes up your future landscape of opportunities and then integrate the understanding of the changes taking place with the capabilities you require. You need to bridge those gaps.

To do this you need to have a sound intellectual structure of your innovation system and this needs to be dynamic not locked up in outdated best practices, mimicking your competitors, these need to be unique and difficult to imitate, forward-looking and highly adaptive to the change going on all around you constantly.

Redesigning your routines for innovation is essential

Are yours locked in routines that focus exclusively on efficiency and being effective? If so, you will continue to struggle with finding innovation that sets you apart as the dynamics and their routines that are needed for innovation to succeed and be embedded are different and not built on ordinary capabilities or existing practices.

Your search is for emerging practices and capabilities that you require to add to achieve more radical innovation outcomes that go beyond the incremental achievements that can be copied very fast by others.

You need to build your reflexes and innovation muscle differently and that requires exploring an innovation fitness regime to map these out and bring innovation closer in its alignment to the strategic needs facing our organizations today.

Setting yourselves truly apart

To set your organization apart, to make it unique and ready to apply innovation in evolutionary ways, it needs to be more responsive to this constant change going on in markets and adapting to new customer needs.

An organization has to be constantly sensing and searching, and then ready to seize and transform and this requires a highly adaptive and dynamic responsive to constant change, though managing the capabilities to deliver on this the innovation required.

Knowing your innovation fitness dynamics is critical within this.

The post Understanding the dynamics within your innovation system first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The emphasis needs to be placed upon building distinct capabilities for innovation success.

“the dynamics within the existing capabilities need to be fully understood and then you need to design the new capabilities on clear understanding of the direction, vision and mission required from innovation to be more successful in meeting the strategic needs”.

Irrespective, there are big, consistent growing questions still nag away in the CEO’s mind on innovation

Q: “What and where do I place my limited (and scarce) resources to maximise the impact of our innovation efforts and how can I be sure?”

“What are those capabilities that generate differential advantage?” How can the CEO or CIO identify the links and connections they want to make their innovation activity align more with the overall capabilities system they have in place? Where does the CEO place his ‘bets’ to get the limited resources he has available aligned to gain this better return on the investments in innovation?

Can we identify a common set of critical innovation capabilities?

Yes, I believe we can.

Something that is not as it is presently a systematic in approach yet it can be by reducing the scattered and piecemeal approach today in building ad hoc innovation capabilities. To build distinct, consistent and well-defined tailored capabilities to the innovation challenges at hand is what the CEO wants to achieve and those responsible need to deliver.

If the organization is knowing the capabilities that matter most to their particular innovation strategy and then in this awareness of what and where to place the organizations innovation fitness programme so they can set about building them.

A fitness regime designed to improve, focus and execute upon these distinct capabilities needed in a highly focused manner  – sound too good to be true? I don’t think so, why not talk to me to understand this better. It has real value if you can constantly ‘orchestrate’ and build innovation capabilities to meet the challenges constantly emerging.

The post Establishing Distinct Capabilities for Innovation Success first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I’d like you to work through these ‘thoughts’ to begin to evaluate the value of knowing your innovation fitness and what makes up your distinct dynamic capabilities:

By firstly mapping out your innovation capabilities to the task at hand enables you to understand and relate to what is needed – we call that the context for innovation.

Innovation Fitness Landscapes helps in this task by identifying the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts‐ and apply the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain.

The greater understanding of the ‘fitness points needed’ can transform your innovation landscape potential, or in business parlance, achieve your goal.

Achieving this fitness accelerates your opportunities into final tangible outcomes. Here is a little bit of the theory:  you look for those critical factors that will give higher value potential or ‘peaks’ that are more valuable to your needs.

The more ‘rugged’ the landscape, the tougher the innovation challenge, can also determines the greater fitness for the rate of innovation needed.

The height of the peaks in these landscapes, the greater value placed upon them, illustrates how intense the innovation challenge is, and the number of critical peaks shows how diverse its potentially is to then provide the appropriate resources.

The ability to identifying the emerging patterns provides the need to act and invest, making adaptive even exploratory walks to provide the appropriate resources needed.

Understanding these will enable you  to move you to the higher fitness points where innovation viability is enhanced and needed to be so as to resolve the challenges faced.

You need to experiment, to take these exploratory ‘walk’s to realize the potential and learn how to scale accordingly.

As you begin to think of your capabilities to innovate it raises critical questions around “are we focusing on the right ones to deliver on the challenges we are facing”, “what can we do differently” and “how can we identify those critical ones”?

The post The value of fitness landscapes as part of your innovation awareness first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

These dynamics are made up of the capabilities and competencies that reveal and clarify what is required as the relevant traversing points needed to achieve improving innovation success, to move you more effectively towards your strategic innovation goals and build a fitter, more responsive and dynamic organization around its needed innovation capacities.

The lead explorer to walk you across this innovation terrain is Paul Hobcraft

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 what are the more important dynamic ones that require a more dedicated focus and placing more of your resources behind, while 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.

There is a complementary set of forces; improving one often triggers improvement in another. What you have to guard against is possibly ignoring one might equally impact negatively on others. Recognizing dependencies is critical and their triggering effect makes innovation evolution even more dynamic.

We are looking for the ‘combination’ effect of a dynamic set of capabilities and competencies that generates improved performance. The issue is to know what and which ones?

The combination effect to gain a greater innovation fitness effect comes from managing this over four stages shown in the above visual of the journey of innovation fitness dynamics.

The four stages will be described in more detail in future blogs but briefly are:

1. The goal within these stage is to identify the key dependencies relevant for improved innovation within your organization to discover
2. what are the mutual dependencies that will have a more dynamic impact on your innovation system so you understand
3. what consequences come from this and how the changing environment will behave so as to consider the effect, that then leads to
4. what recognition and implications this has so as to put in place an ongoing, evolving set of innovation dynamics that keep you fit to perform innovation on a sustaining higher performance basis.

Again I want to emphasis here, this is an evolving journey but the critical recognition here is, for innovation to continue to be the driver of future growth and wealth, it clearly does need to have a greater understanding and recognition of its management potential within organizations.

This site www.innovationfitnessdynamics.com is determined to push beyond today’s accepted, often ‘lagging’ performance from innovation activity, and raise the innovation performance engine up within organizations. I feel we do have this critical need to have in place a growing clarity of the factors needed to consistently deliver a more ‘leading’ position of knowing what does actually have real dynamic impact, both on an organizations innovation performance and the individual contributions that contribute towards the required strategic goals and objectives.

This I feel states our journey and how we are planning this out to traverse across the terrain towards better innovation solutions, that make up the dynamics of innovation and provide a ‘fitness’ solution that is unique to your needs. Care to share and join the journey?

Paul Hobcraft

Mail to : paul*AT*agilityinnovation.com

www.paul4innovating.com

www.agilityinnovation.com

The post Moving along the path to innovation fitness first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

There is a continuing need is to build the management of innovation into a clear organizational capability, where innovation becomes a continuous effective innovation process.

To this end I have produced a conceptual model of what constitutes the ‘make up’ for providing an ongoing innovation performance engine- the innovation fitness landscape and the dynamics– that determine the appropriate capabilities and capacities available & required. I felt it needs a dedicated website to be the ‘go to’ source of reference. It is a work-in-progress so please recognize this when you visit it here: http://bit.ly/wX5q8R.

This is an evolving journey, any terrain that we travel over does offers very different challenges to build innovation capability into the very fabric of organizations, it needs building and structuring thoughtfully. You will see there are so far already thirteen categories making up this quest to map out and build out this innovation fitness. Each category is part of the total workout we need to go through. I’d suggest be selective in reading these, take your time and as you explore these progressively you will begin to see the overarching ‘fit’ these have with each other but each person, each organization will have different needs to get innovation fit. The more you explore, the more dynamic they become in possibility but it does takes time, for you and for me to build this fitness regime. We do always need a clear starting point and also a journey’s end in mind. See http://bit.ly/A0en7f for the ‘about’ story we all need to reflect upon.

The recognition that innovation for us all, to make it sustaining, does needs dedicated  investment in the understanding of the makeup of the capabilities to build a required ‘innovation performance engine.’ This is to provide more of the rich potential for wealth and value creation required in most organizations. It is an area of serious under-development at present, when you compare this with the focus on physical assets and general make up of offering support with limited direct knowledge application, within the majority of organizations.

The makeup of innovation

Innovation is made up of both tangible and intangible assets. It is the marriage of these two that makes innovation a unique capability to manage in well structured ways. It is the people engaged in innovation activity that make it work.  Everything else, the process, structures, technologies and management systems are just the contributing enablers.

The struggle to date is that innovation remains hard to manage well; we strive to systemize it and then attempt to replicate any success we achieve. Often this does not work as the variables that make up innovation can be different for each innovation event or activity.

The important point though is successful innovation contains core elements and processes regardless of industry, form, or type of innovation, we are pursuing.  Much of the difference though is in its varying degree’s based on these core elements. Our search was to find those core elements so as to leverage and strengthen them even further to strengthen an organizations capability to innovation continuously in a sustaining manner.

We as organizations strive to achieve distinct competitive advantage, and innovation is one of those real contribution points this can achieve this. The need is to make the innovation capabilities and capacities a distinctive, not easy to copy, unique set. These are shaped by the context and content of innovation, the organizations position and its choice of evolutionary paths it has decided to take or needs to take.

The emphasis points needed for dynamic innovation capabilities

Dynamic capabilities emphasize management capabilities and the inimitable (unique) combinations of resources that are constantly at work across all functions to make them distinctive and valuable.

Distinguishing innovation capabilities that are relevant are based on the type of knowledge they contain. Functional capabilities allow development of technical, practical knowledge. Integrative capabilities allow firms to absorb knowledge from external sources and this is where the absorptive capacity develop comes in. Innovation requires more of a higher-order integrated capability approach to constantly learn, develop, mould and manage multiple capabilities. This required the integration of critical capabilities to successfully stimulate innovation for effective and improving performance.

Many of the identified resources in capabilities have some level of complementary, improving one triggers improvement in another. Equally ignoring one can impact negatively on others. So individual components on their own have limited effect, it is the combination effect that generates the improving performance. Equally, the needs do change over time and you have to constantly ‘refresh, challenge and stimulate’ these otherwise you can have core rigidly set in.

Shifting away from the accepted norm

Innovation understanding and building strength in competencies and capabilities takes an organization beyond the accepted norm of managing efficiency, quality, being responsive and reacting with speed- all challenging within themselves. Innovation represents today’s competitive advantage statement that should be supported by these others. We must avoid dysfunctional consequences and why the existing systems and structures do have to ‘fold into’ new innovation based ones.

Organizations need to shift from the one often still found today, of a higher focus on stability, efficiency and effectiveness for profitability though that current preoccupation with performing routines and formalised structures. The challenge in today’s world is to be adaptable, agile, adjusting to offer consistent instability in the right ways to keep adjusting to the consistent market challenges. Innovation in itself is a force of instability. The shift needed to be made is to balance the dual ‘tensions of stability through efficiency, with change driven by innovation. It is the dynamic forces within the world we operate within that require us to respond and mirror, with equally the capacity for managing dynamic innovation capabilities.

Integrating back or making anew

The challenge is to integrate all of the organizations capabilities into the innovation process, not as many do today, try to integrate innovation into the existing structures- it does not work. The linkage and mechanisms need to be focused on creating new knowledge and competitive advantage, not searching to maintain obtained knowledge offering known results, today we are searching for resolving the unknowns, yet to be articulated needs to grow our markets in ways that customers strongly relate too and reward us for in multiple ways.

So the combination of efficiency of the existing structures needs folding into the more knowledge intensive ‘creative’ new one for achieving competitive advantage.

Innovation capability is defined as the ability to continuously transform incoming knowledge and news concepts and ideas into new products, services, processes, systems and new business models, for the benefit of the organization and the stakeholders. Innovation is about synthesising as well as operating in the two paradigms of efficiency of the existing and innovating new to the world.

The need is to recognize an organization-wide innovation capability that pervades all aspects of the organizations existence, forming the core value system to the measures and behaviours that are exhibited and on show on a daily basis for all to appreciate, assess and value.

Being nimble, flexible for managing across the different domains.

The need is to build a nimble, flexibly effective innovation performance engine that is quick to adapt to those constant changing market conditions. High performance deliberately and systematically enable and motivate the chaotic and complex domains (reference the Cynefin model on this) of novel and emergent practice that ‘present’ divergent behaviours and where the dynamics of innovation lie. Equally knowing the reinforcing practices and processes that make up of existing good and best practice are needed to make these more efficient and effective and reliable in their management.

Each part of the innovation fitness dynamics though is designed to reinforce and extract the innovation performance required of them. It is identifying the elements (both dynamic and more static repeating aspects) that make up the fitness landscape for managing innovation’s performance. I can only encourage you to begin to explore the categories that make up our terrain map to begin to consider your own innovation fitness journey of building capability and capacity that makes you a more dynamic organization to respond to different challenges in todays more fluid and adaptive world.

Ó      PAH 22.02.2012.W-I-P

Paul Hobcraft

Mail to : paul*AT*agilityinnovation.com

www.paul4innovating.com

www.agilityinnovation.com

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“Slow constrains quick, slow controls quick”

There is so much built in tension, bias, barriers, mindsets, mental model conflicts, and all types of friction seemingly going on around us, you must sometimes think all our organizations can only be totally dysfunctional.

Has anyone not come across some or all of these?

Dysfunctional leadership symptoms and those typical warning signs of dictatorial leadership, no feedback on performance, personal agendas, more ‘political’ compensation than ‘performance related ones, inefficient use of resources, empire-building practices, unequal workload distribution, too much management, fragmented organization efforts. There is simply just too much talk, ineffective  and incessant meetings, a lack of collaboration across departments, ‘selective’ low productivity when you are working way beyond the normal, feeling in a constant crisis mode, watching a morale deterioration take place before your eyes, the,  backstabbing, starving projects of essential resources and finally, working in highly stressful workplaces.

A pretty depressing list isn’t it? I’m sure you can think of a few more besides.

When you are up against some or all of these how can you feel trust, belief and be innovative? Partly from what I’ve been reading and from my own perspective let me offer some thoughts to reduce some of these unhealthy tensions organizations seem to have, that certainly act as real constraints for innovation to really take hold.

The worrying thing is any dynamics within the system are dominated by the slow components, and the rapid components simply have to follow along.  Slow constrains quick, slow controls quick. The only way to ensure a speeding up is to be coherent on the purpose, clarify the bounds and governing principles that need to be enacted.  Simply by consciously working on all the dysfunction points within an organization will reduce the tensions, reduce the shearing and allow the organization in all its layers to ‘react’ and be allowed to come back into a balance, where innovation has more space to equally site alongside efficiency as the organizations emphasis points, so both can focus on outcome orientation.

How can we break into this and design something different?

Recently a number of comments have triggered my thinking about this whole area of blockages that seem to not allow innovation to take hold in organizations the way it needs too. The writing of Scott Anthony recently under the article “Negotiating Innovation & Control”, the book “Relentless Innovation” and stream of thought provoking views of Jeffrey Phillips wanting us to challenge the “Business as Usual” approach. Then we have Gary Hamel in his new book “What Matters Now”  where he shares his agenda for building organizations, that can flourish in a world of diminished hopes, relentless change and ferocious competition. This is not a book about doing better. This is an impassioned plea to reinvent management as we know it—to rethink the fundamental assumptions we have about capitalism, organizational life, and the meaning of work.

Each has a theme running through them in different ways, the need to achieve continuous innovation needs a massive change in mindset and in managing the ‘heart’ of the organization. This heart is unhealthy and will need new values, new processes and new belief systems. You add in calls from John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Ranjay Gulati  and countless others, we are in need of a more radical agenda to rethink management, not just for innovation management.

The legend of the Gordian Knot

Some time back Chuck Frey, well known in innovation circles, wrote about the Gordian Knot. “For people the world over, the Gordian Knot represents the difficult, the intractable and often the insolvable problem. Today’s systemic business problems are the modern-day equivalent of this seemingly impossible challenge.

According to Greek mythology,  the huge, ball-like Turkish knot with no ends exposed was impossible to untie. An oracle had predicted that the first person to do so would become the ruler of all Asia. Thousands of people had tried, without success, to unlock its complex riddles. Alexander of Macedonia, son of King Philip II of Macedon, solved this puzzle simply and very creatively – by cutting it in half with his sword, exposing its ends and making it possible to untie. Alexander the Great went on to conquer all of Asia, just as the oracle predicted”.

So how can we cut the intractable knot inside organizations and survive?

We all face increasing uncertainties and are having our trust battered. We are seemingly not rising to the challenges that seem to be growing in complexity in global and organizational context.Innovation has a vital role to play but it must be ‘treated’ differently.

Where do we start? Firstly we need to revisit the work on “adaptive enterprises and systems”. We need to find ways to deal with unpredictable, discontinuous change and make this more predictable for us to manage.

We lack often a real coherence of purpose; we lurch from one opportunity to another, from one quarter of results into another with often no consistency in our activities. Performance has been taken over by opportunistic behaviours.  Innovation often takes the real brunt of this.

Our intended strategy, moves suddenly into a deliberate strategy, and then somehow this gets abandoned or unrealized and slowly we replace this with a emergent strategy that is rapidly become our realized strategy that we present to the world, as a response to ‘factors outside our control’ for our often indifferent performance. Who really talks about the EXACT results achieved from innovation for instance? All we here is just a general reference to it, to cloak innovation often in the ineffectiveness that lies within.

For innovation and many things going on within organizations they often lack a real coherence, they ‘signal’ inconsistent behaviours, especially within the organization. These bad signals simply build up all the tensions and dysfunctional aspects that middle order management and the organization in general has to mop up and cope with.

How can innovation thrive in this sort of chaotic mess? No wonder it never takes hold, it just has nothing ‘permanent’ to attach too and grow. Management needs a radical overhaul so innovation can be the vehicle for what is articulated but often poorly delivered on a consistent basis.

Context & Coordination needs designing in purposefully.

Again, where do we start? We start with ‘disconnect’ that organizations often have. The understanding of the underlying purpose of the organization beyond just making money and keeping the shareholders happy does need a deeper primary function, it needs rearticulating. Some organizations do a reasonable job of this but many simply don’t.

We need to restate our primary function and purpose far more in its societal contribution. We need to express the bounds as a governing set of principles that are known, reinforced and measured against. We then need to set about building in a consistent way, the capabilities that are able to produce the outcomes. We need to build in the accountabilities into the roles that reflect that innovation, effectiveness and efficiency that is needed so they can be managed equally side by side. We need to teach the ability to be adaptable and recognize the differences so as to actively manage the ‘creative’ conflicts and tensions.

Reduce the tension in the layers or structures

The really hard part of managing in larger organizations is in managing the layers and competing forces. Often we forget to reinforce acceptable behaviours, we leave role structures lose and incomplete and we set deliverables in often ‘woolly’ ways. This just promotes uncertainly and it is not an adaptive organization in leaving this so open. These unnatural built-in tensions create this shearing effect. They grind against each other, like tectonic plates that force further disruption and upheaval.

These different layers actually require several levels of reconfiguration designed into the organization. One really critical one to address and to ‘kill off,’ is the pressure of time. Time horizons to achieve different tasks often cannot be ‘legislated’ or ‘dictated’ but sadly they are forced on reluctant innovators responsible for delivery of new concepts. We need to re-establish the difference between goals– within a certain period covered (one year), objectives– attained later but are progressed within the period and finally ideals– those unattainable but clearly possible concepts, that progress at slower rates and go well beyond normal goals. Innovation works within this environment, actually it will thrive.

Not just the incremental, but the radical, disruptive and breakthrough innovation craved for by the top management, can finally have a ‘decent’ time horizon to be managed through. Planning needs to account for all three horizons and publically discussed, irrespective of the industry you are in, it does not matter if you are building planes or developing food products.

We really should stop pretending that innovation is not so hard and actually state it is often incompatible to much of what we perform on a daily basis.  The task of managing intangibles (unknowns) alongside tangibles (known’s) needs greater appreciation of their complexities, and the difficulties of balancing the two for achieving  a ‘decent’ result. Leadership, I believe, would need to understand innovation far more in this demanding environment of enquiry. No wonder it is often ducked and just vaguely talked about as much of innovation understanding is still poorly understood in its impacts and effect.

The opportunity of the network economy

Again, the realization of the growing web of networks that we are constantly engaging with, is become a growing part of the new more adaptive innovating enterprise. We need to encourage more empowerment to engage with outside parties, to explore, to investigate, to bring in and then diffuse and disperse in new ways. For this we need to design around more absorptive capacity I’ve often written about. (See   http://bit.ly/zdfmba).

Reducing activities and replacing these with outcome orientation

Innovation is no different from what we expect from efficiency or effectiveness; we want to see the outcomes.   We have struggled on many parts of establishing the really good metrics for judging innovation. They seem to get lost within organizations. Part of the innovation activities has been assigned to some other cost centre, or the capacity was already established and we often don’t break these down and assign these clearly enough to the different activities, we should, but into outcome orientation ones. Were the activities contributing to efficiency or innovation? We judge these through effectiveness of the outcome.

We need to balance existing performance engines for repeatable everyday tasks with innovation delivery engines for new activities to make our organizations function more effectively. Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble have offered some thoughts on this at the implementation stage, although they are still needs more examination.  As Scott Anthony points out in his article “Negotiating Innovation and Control’ on the different ways to balance tension there is one, in my opinion, that needs deeper investigation and development and that is the ‘ambidextrous’ one. This makes distinctions but links the parts of the whole organization by developing competing frames, not competing forces. Roger Martin suggests in one of his books “The Opposable Mind” that we need to develop “integrative thinking” as part of this need to change.

Ecosystems often reflect the shearing effect.

In any environment the ‘rates of exchange’ of the different components or constituents operate at different speeds. Interactions occur more at your own level of contribution, the different layers sometimes you are simply oblivious too or ignore. The ‘in-spite of’ syndrome kicks in. Sometimes though, something catastrophic does occurs and you have to pay attention ( a merger, layoffs, threat of closure) but the real reality is, different layers within organizations tend to be often simply oblivious, even impervious, to necessary change and just ‘does its job’.

Maybe then, this is why so many organizations seem dysfunctional but do continue to survive, to limp along, until something really does disrupt their world as the existing ecosystem just seems to allow different interactions and speeds. Can we not alter this though in more thoughtful ways. than the ‘carrot and the stick’ approach or ‘fear and retribution’ methodologies often employed to achieve results?

As I mentioned in my opening remarks, the worrying thing is that any dynamics within the system are dominated by the slow components, and the rapid components simply have to follow along. Slow constrains quick, slow controls quick. The only way to ensure a speeding up is to be coherent on the purpose, clarify the bounds and governing principles that need to be enacted.

Simply by consciously working on all the dysfunction points within an organization will certainly reduce the tensions, reduce the shearing and allow the organization in all its layers to ‘react’ and be allowed to come back into a balance, where innovation sits equally alongside efficiency, especially if both focus on outcome orientation and that certainly is not the current business as usual we see today.

Perhaps working on these dysfunction spots it might free up some real, much needed space for innovation to take a deeper hold. It does seem with all the suggested emphasis on efficiency and effectiveness, if you accept this argument, it might be a good idea to have innovation alongside, as it does thrives more when there is creative tensions around!

You bring a more ‘dynamic’ environment into play by bringing together the sense of purpose and the governing principles of how you are setting about achieving this- through your people and building their capabilities to innovation.

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