absorptive capacity - Innovation Thinking and Resources

Struggling with counting ALL the sums of our capital

By @paul4innovating July 24, 2014Absorptive Capacity, Capabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Fitness Landscaping Regimes, Outcomes & Expectancies, The Big Challenges

Organizations have been focused for far too long around the importance of financial capital. It determines and drives organizations destinies. We are caught in a constant focus upon our achieving a return on our (financial) capital as our measuring criteria. Organizations strive for improving their ROCE, RONA, IRR, EVA and a host of other financial measures.

As Clayton Christensen has been arguing the agenda of organizations begins and ends with the “search for numbers”. I think there is a time for changing this, we need to search for the knowledge that makes-up eventually the numbers.

There has been a distant voice for some time putting forward the need to appreciate and value the other capitals sitting within organizations. Much of the discussions have been housed under the term “intellectual capital” which denotes the sum of knowledge made up and contributed by our human assets, our organizational structures and our relationships that are developed.

These are the ‘capitals’ that transform into economic value through organization action. It is the financial capital that simply finances this.

Are we really measuring what matters?

By @paul4innovating July 24, 2014Capabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities

Today, it is the non-financial performance, made up of mostly the intangibles within organizations, that is accounting for upwards of 80% of present investors’ valuation of our organizations.

Yet do shareholders really have the knowledge to judge the real source of value creation inside our organizations? I think not but they should. Does Management actually?

We lack a real line of sight into the true value of our organizations that make them dynamic

Building upon four key wealth creating pillars

By @paul4innovating July 20, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Foster Performance, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Most rooms we enter have four sides and are traditionally built on a standard four-pillar design; they provide the structure to build upon.

Presently in many of our economies, particularly in the West, we are struggling to find real growth; we are limited in our wealth-creating possibilities.

Why is that? Our structures seem to be weak, not strong.

Putting some dynamic tension into the system

By @paul4innovating July 7, 2014Absorptive Capacity, Capabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Natural & Unnatural tensions

There is a growing need for having some dynamic tensions within the organization’s system; these helps generate the better conditions for innovation to thrive. We are learning more on the better tools, techniques and approaches available for putting the learning tensions into our work, making them more dynamic, linked and increasingly relevant to the work to be done.

1). A common language is essential

Any dynamics in the system needs that ability to talk the same language, something that becomes common and embedded to support the routines and move quicker to the concepts and solutions, as others can ‘understand’ them as well. It is through working on the inner stories and appreciating the history, it is having an appreciation of events, good and bad, it is through local slogans, your jargon and dialogues that bring people together. The power of storytelling helps gain adoption and identification to those needs for working on a common cause.

Absorptive Capacity, Knowledge Management and Innovation

By @paul4innovating February 9, 2014Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, gaining innovation momentum, innovation execution delivery, Leading innovation, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Let’s start with some defining statements. Innovation is totally dependent on becoming aware of external ideas and the knowledge that is needed and then translated for it to become new innovation.

We can ‘fall over these ideas’ or we can find ideas or concepts through explicit search. Then to translate these and turn them into something new and different we need to have established some sort of diffusion and dissemination processes.

Having this established as a sustaining system provides an essential source to building organizations capabilities and competencies.

The more we work external knowledge the more we potentially enhance and multiply its value from a single idea into the potentials for multiple innovations. Having a systematic framework can be dramatic for generating new knowledge and gathering ideas for new innovation potential.

Throughout this post I’ll link into previous posts that you might like to explore but this is not necessary.

The issue is how we set about adopting and adapting new knowledge.

Organizational legacy often chokes innovation

By @paul4innovating January 27, 2014Absorptive Capacity, Capabilities and Capacities, Natural & Unnatural tensions, Pathway dependence curves1 Comment

Often organizations are weighed down by legacy; it chokes off innovation and much of the potential creativity. This comes in many forms; in its culture, in its history, its core markets or products, in its systems, structures and processes built around innovation practice.

Today, we are confronted with a very different global market place than in the last century. National borders and regulations built to protect those that are ‘within’ in the past have rapidly become a major part of the ‘containing- restraining’ factors that are rendering many previously well-respected organizations as heading towards being obsolete and not in tune with today’s different world where global sourcing determines much.

They are increasingly trapped in declining markets, starved of the new capabilities and capacities to grow a business beyond ‘traditional’ borders, so this means they are unable to take up the new challenges that are confronting them. They see themselves as reliant on hanging on to the existing situation as long as they can, often powerless to make the necessary shifts, failing to open up, finding it increasingly more than difficult to find the ways of letting go, of changing. They are trapped in legacy.

The world is working within increased complexity, are you?

By @paul4innovating January 26, 2014Capabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Natural & Unnatural tensions, The Big Challenges

The challenges of managing in today’s worlds are tough, very tough and demanding. It is so volatile, potentially disruptive and full of risk. Organizations are simply struggling to shed their clothes of the 20^th century and find a way to smoothly manage into becoming more adaptable and agile in form. They are adjusting to offer consistent responses to instability in the most effective ways, to keep adapting to the consistent market challenges,and in so doing profiting from meeting that latest challenge or disruptive opportunity.

The problem is you simply can’t manage this smoothly, it will be highly disruptive as the organization re-equips themselves and learns, often in the hardest way possible, through failure, through experimentation, through risk-taking . Innovation is increasingly seen as the pathway forward in capturing growth and grabbing any advantage, even if these are increasingly transient. Yet as we look towards building our innovation capabilities we need to work in totally different ways and see ‘things’ in new ways.

Innovation in itself is also a force of instability and we need to find ways to embrace much of its uncertainties by understanding its dynamics. We need to have a major shift in our organizational thinking, needed to find the appropriate new balance within those dual ‘tensions’ of ‘stability’ through efficiency, with its opposite, ‘change’ driven by innovation. It is these dynamic forces within the world we work that require us to respond by building that capacity for managing those ‘dynamic’ innovation capabilities, that today’s markets are requiring and organizations are needing to master.

Today organizations essential design is for openness, agility and flexibility

By @paul4innovating October 13, 2013Absorptive Capacity, Exploratory Walks & Needs, Impact & Scale, Mapping & Rugged Terrains

There is a need in any framework design for building a new integrated innovation network that it needs to have openness, agility and flexibility purposefully built into it. It is more than likely that in the past design, the legacy within existing systems needs radically dismantling and redesigning to reflect the multitude of changes happening.

The reality today is we have to tear down much of what we have built up and in place to reflect the changes occurring all around us. We need to account both internally, in making a new structure for crucial decisions, based on those far more dispersion principles but also on the external, in how you will be reacting to competition and the challenges being presented in changing market conditions.

Approaching innovation through fitness dynamics needs a structured approach.

By @paul4innovating September 4, 2013Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, gaining innovation momentum, innovation execution delivery, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

This post follows on from my recent one of “the Innovation Journeyman.” We do have a real journey still to travel to understand the dynamics within innovation. Here, I want to lay out a possible path that might advance us towards achieving this. This includes a fairly ‘intensive’ nine step approach outlined below.

What we do need to do is constantly evolve our innovation capabilities to perform in more dynamic and flexible ways. We need to acquire that consistent aim of achieving a more adaptable and adjusting approach to innovation in all its parts.

We need to meet the changing circumstances and challenges we are all facing to regain the real growth needed from our economies and organizations, making what we do at the same time, more sustainable. Delivering better innovation outcomes is central to this task.

The Innovation Journeyman

By @paul4innovating August 29, 2013Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, gaining innovation momentum, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Continuing the innovation journey searching for the framework to deliver the dynamics of innovation by focusing upon achieving a certain innovation fitness.

My personal innovation journey started way back in 2001 when I got ‘hooked’ on innovation and what it could deliver in its impact on a business.

I believe it is for greater engagement within the organization and increased identification through their people, with the potential for learning and improving their capabilities.

Progressively I learnt about innovation, studied it as part of my Master’s degree and began to practice the parts others were prepared to pay me for, either to listen to, or offer advice.

This innovation journey took on a shape that eventually became 100% of my focus within my advisory practices at Agility Innovation Specialists and Hoca Consulting by systematically building my understanding of innovation and providing this knowledge to others through advisory, coaching, writing and mentoring services.

It still is a long continuous journey twelve plus years later.

I’m constantly learning, reading, absorbing and interpreting what I understand and then attempting to provide my thoughts to others, those willing to listen!

I’m comfortable in much, totally restless in so much more out there to explore and work through, so as to achieve potential solutions, through experimentation and prototyping until they become recognized as relevant and applicable.

Investigating, researching and reading all required a significant amount of time, all alongside needing to practice innovation, working to clients’ needs or pushing for their attention to changes taking place within the field of innovation management and what they needed to do about it.

Dynamic capability applied to innovation gained my increased attention