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Year after year, this analysis has proven that those firms identified as being the most effective innovators consistently outperform their peers and the market.”

Now is that surprising?

It should not be but sadly for the vast majority of companies that do not treat innovation as seriously as they should, as the growth enabler, it keeps them in a constantly lagging position. It tells a very powerful message, one of investing in innovation seriously and in sustaining levels, you can grow well above others.

Points from this research

I’ve known Tim Jones for some time. Tim is certainly a recognized leader in innovation, growth and foresight – he has always been helping organizations grow and be ready for the future and does some terrific work.

He is a founder and programme director for different initiatives “housed” under 1) the innovation leaders org,- this is the research programme that identifies the world’s most effective innovators  2) the growth agenda org, – that sets about helping companies build new growth platforms and 3) the future agenda – the world’s largest open foresight initiative explores the key issues facing society over the next decade.

Recently Tim has been  announcing the results of the 2016/17 Innovation Leaders research that identifies the companies which achieve the most from their innovation activities and deliver tangible, sustained growth. Now in its 16th year, this annual analysis profiles the global leaders across 25 different sectors, (click this one to see who) highlighting the shifts taking place and identifying new achievements.

The 2016/7 analysis reveals three notable trends extracted from Tim’s supporting remarks from this recent report:

US Dominance in leading innovators

“After greater European and Asian presence over the past decade, this year 20 of the 25 leaders are US based organizations. This is the highest single country concentration since the research began in 2001 and reflects both the continued global dominance of the West Coast as a centre of innovation and its impact on other sectors across the country, some of which previously had a greater focus on M&A driven growth.

The remaining leading innovators are based in Denmark, Korea, Germany, Spain and the UK. The drop in European presence on the list, down 50% within a couple of years, should be raising some hard questions about the future of innovation across Europe”

My thoughts here: For me this does raise real concerns on innovation across Europe. It consistently is lagging and seemingly not catching up as it does not have all the levers to become more dynamic in growth as we are seeing in the tepid economic growth conditions seen in most European countries.

Partnerships at the Fore – the trend critical to finding new growth

“Although effective collaboration has been a key component of successful innovation for some sectors for some time, it is clear that, today, this is increasingly influential across the board. Organisation’s such as Accenture and Cisco and KT Corporation have positioned themselves specifically to help to drive customer innovation; companies like Adidas, Delta and LEGO are using partnerships to maximise brand impact; and firms including Boston Scientific, Dow Chemical and Lilly are all focused on collaboration across their respective ecosystems. Irrespective of sector, deeper partnership-driven innovation is very much at the fore. This does not suggest that the days of ‘going it alone’ are over, but highlights how, in an ever more interconnected world, delivering high impact change requires new alliances”.

My thoughts here: This is why I believe the power of platforms and working in ecosystems is certainly one of the key ways forward to “innovate for growth”

Big Bets

“While some companies such as FedEx, Inditex, PepsiCo and Reckitt Benckiser, continue to focus on delivering consistent incremental innovation, more radical breakthrough approaches are core to several organisations’ growth strategies. It is clear from both new product launches and underlying patent activity. Alongside Alphabet’s significant ‘Other Bets’ activities, Amazon’s strong moves into AI and Apple’s major R&D investments, others are also raising the stakes. Whether this is Bank of America’s proactive positioning on block-chain, Humana’s investments in digital, LEGO’s movie partnerships or Nvidia’s expansion from gaming into automotive, more established companies seem willing to explore and support a number of major intelligent future growth investments: Tesla’s bold moves continue to capture many headlines but others are not holding back”.

My thoughts here: The radical / transformation bets are beginning to take hold. More companies worried over their poor growth track records are looking to find “growth pathways” but struggle to find the ways to do this as they have failed to make the necessary, sustaining innovation capacity building investments.

About the Innovation Leaders Analysis

In order to gain an insightful and validated perspective on the true innovation leaders on a sector-by-sector basis, the annual Innovation Leaders analysis assesses the performance of 1,500 of the world’s top companies against a number of specific key parameters.

The individual innovation and growth performance of the top companies within each sector are compared against each other and additional research around the differences between the leading organisations is undertaken to ensure that the perspectives gained are fully up to date. This provides what we believe to be the most accurate picture of the companies that are the most effective innovators in each sector, and allows us to highlight the respective key competitive strengths.

The eight areas that we research and input into the assessments across different sectors are:

1      Organisational culture and supporting structure;

2      Strategic focus on innovation driving corporate growth;

3      New product launches and relative success ratios;

4      Growth in revenues, profits and market capitalisation;

5      Average revenue and margin per product or customer;

6      Investment in activities such as R&D and marketing;

7      Brand value and human capital growth; and

8      Peer review from within the sector.

For more information on this research please contact research@innovationleaders.org or to view the recent presentations.

So here is a link to the results of the 2016/17 Innovation Leaders research that identifies the companies and a link to their new website

I’d recommend exploring this as I picked this up on from Tim’s LinkedIn post, as it was only published today, 5th March 2017, and where I have drawn most of this ‘informing’ post.

Essential read for those wanting to build the business case for innovation and see who is leading in innovation and growth returns from their focus on this.

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The post Setting yourself apart through Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The lack of having a well mapped out customer journey means missing out on opportunities caused by not knowing this complete set of connections being made into you. By not knowing all these connecting points and drawing them together in a cohesive plan, there is a significant chance you are simply restricting the developing of innovation solutions that map back to all the decision-making that is going on in the customers’ minds.

This failure to optimize and seize upon all the possible options to connect with your customers is restricting your ability to broaden out your innovation solutions, making the journey more value creating, it certainly can be really holding your business back.

As you explore the digital transformation path this can become your best opportunity to connect along the total customer experience and see a greater return on this understanding and investment.

With the increasing need to adapt to a digital world, the essential need for understanding customer behaviors of those wanting to engage with your business or brand becomes even more of a challenge if you have not mapped this out. Also, how comfortable are you as new customers start connecting – can you have any certainty of the reasons why they did, what decided this and what might hold them for the future of a repeating business?

The vital map of the customer journey

A recent Altimeter report “the 2016 State of Digital Transformation” discusses these problems, along with many others. The mapping of the customer experience (CX) has become a top driver of digital transformation, yet only half of the companies studied have mapped or are mapping their customer’s journey. So that you are aware, the data and insights in this report are based on the input of more than 500 digital transformation strategists and executives who are leading change within their organizations.

In a good visual, they illustrate the severity of the digital transformation challenges: finding that 71% struggle to understand behaviours or impact of a new customer; 69% cited the lack of data or ROI to justify the value of data transformations; and 67% on the risk management, compliance and /or legal implications. Lacking the essential insights many companies are failing to grasp the potential, with many (alternative) innovation opportunities wasted and perhaps suffering a growing customers churn rate. Knowing the why of your customers is something that keeps many marketing and C-level executives up at night.

The good news is that although half of those surveyed are now mapping the customer experience journey most of these are only just doing this. Back in 2014 at the time of the last survey by Altimeter, only 25% of companies undergoing some form of digital transformation had mapped the customer journey, as now 88% cited CX as the driver of change and why technology was the necessary solution. There is some real catching up taking place to justify any transformation.

I still sense that it still seems IT & Marketing are not working on this together, there are separate initiatives and operating in their own silo’s, often in pursuit of different investment decisions that might be better served by combining forces.

As each organization changes in its modernization with new systems, models, processes and architectures it is this lack of customer-centricity that is a growing problem. The lack of a vital set of insights means the continued investment taking place in front-and-back-office solutions has this lack of the customers’ expectations, preferences and values clearly understood.

There is even more of a warning within the report

Traditional touchpoints, such as websites, contact centers, representatives, affiliates, etc., seem to not meet heightened expectations. In fact, they deter from what’s becoming an on-demand customer experience. Equally Mobile has given way to what Google refers to as “micro-moments,” and they are completely upending traditional customer journeys.

These mobile-first moments play out in common scenarios when someone is intent to do, buy, or learn something. As consumers increasingly use their phones to complete everyday activities, they’re fracturing the consumer journey into hundreds of new “micro” touchpoints where they seek real-time, mobile-optimized content, reviews, shared experiences, and direction online.

Despite all of this, just 20% of digital transformation leaders are studying the mobile customer journey and/or designing for real-time micro-moments in addition to customer journey work. There is a need to understand these ‘micro-moments’ as they increasingly impact on the customer decision-making, behaviors, and values.

The report warns even further: Mobile is just the beginning of disruption in the customer journey. With the runway for disruptive technologies still ahead (e.g., wearables, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality), companies will need a resilient infrastructure that adapts to not only mobile’s “micro-moments,” but also the impact of all these trends and new devices over time.

There is also a change taking place on the primary catalyst

While CX was initially the primary catalyst for digital transformation, innovation, agility, and the pursuit of digital relevance are the new factors driving companies along the maturity model. For executives and senior leadership, the need to accelerate innovation (81%) was at the top of the digital transformation agenda.

Right behind this was the need to modernize the IT infrastructure with increased agility, flexibility, management, and security (80%), and the third priority for enterprise transformation is improving operational agility to more rapidly adapt to change (79%).

Altimeter argues it is through these priorities, businesses are developing a roadmap that helps them compete for the present while building a next-generation business model to compete for the future.

For this report, Altimeter, a Prophet Company worked with Phronesis Partners to conduct a survey of 528 qualified digital transformation strategists and executives leading change within their companies. Respondents were from companies in varied industries, with more than 250 employees, in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, and Germany.

In summary

As Altimeter state in their opener in this report and I repeat here in my closing:

“Digital Darwinism continues to impact businesses as technology and societies evolve. As a result, organizations are moving away from “business as usual” as they pursue digital transformation to compete”

We are all aware (or should be) that customers are increasingly choosing products and services based increasingly on the quality of the experiences they have with them. The pressing need is to address a competitive risk if you are not mapping and understanding the channels, touchpoints and shifts taking place in technology solutions that capture, evaluate and determine customer experience.

Are you meeting your customer needs, do you fully understand their motivations, associated behaviors to design a better range of innovation solutions?

Link to the Altimeter Report “The 2016 State of Digital Transformation”

Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their agreement, I have added this to my own site.

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The post Mapping the customer journey is the top driver for digital transformation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

An article from Bloomberg reports that companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index are “poised to spend $914 billion on share buybacks and dividends this year, or about 95 percent of earnings.”
95% of earnings – Doug rightly says “wow” and offers a thoughtful set of observations

“Every organization that enjoys free cash flow makes a decision on where to allocate that resource. If the opportunity available to the organization meets or exceeds the hurdle rate—the desired, expected rate of return—then, in theory, they invest in that opportunity. If not, then no: the organization returns the cash to the investors. Of course, earnings come after investments the organization makes in innovation—research & development expenses, for example. Many do invest a lot in R&D”

He then remarks “And yet…..and yet” ….

“This offers the implicit message from the firm to the investment community: “we do not have a better use for this cash (i.e., the ideas we might pursue do not seem as promising and as compelling as we would like).”

“We know that we cannot cut, or cost save, our way to growth. By extension, we know that we cannot grow a business for the long-term by returning all profits to the investors. Doing so suggests a lack of vision—a lack of acuity into what the customer wants and what the market demands”.

Then you begin to read through the Bloomberg article

“Companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index really love their shareholders. Maybe too much!  Money returned to stock owners exceeded profits in the first quarter and may again in the third”

The Bloomberg article goes on “Buybacks have helped fuel one of the strongest rallies of the past 50 years as stocks with the most repurchases gained more than 300 percent since March 2009. Now, with returns slowing, investors say executives risk snuffing out the bull market unless they start ploughing money into their businesses”

Some further quotes from the Bloomberg article
“You can only go so far with financial engineering before you actually have to have a business with real growth,”

“Buybacks are something corporations can take control of and at low borrowing costs, they’re a viable option,”

“If management can’t unearth future opportunities for growth, as a shareholder, I lose confidence.”

“Buybacks have become sort of the low-risk medicine in the C suite,”.

“The reality is capital expenditure comes with risk, a significant amount of risk, especially in a slow-growth world. Buybacks offer a lot of flexibility.”

So you do have to ask the really hard question: where is the future REAL growth going to come from?

So why are our companies not ploughing additional money back into their business, partly it serves the interest of top management who are often compensated on EPS. Businesses today remain utterly reluctant to buy new equipment, build factories or hire more workers, while management regards the recovery as uneven, it has regarded the buyback strategy as the best bet. How totally wrong!

Clearly the view that your own stock is under-priced, you believe your strategy is the right one and you are certainly not going to sit on hordes of cash, it is perhaps value-destroying to “our” shareholders. Yeah right including mine!

This is where the whole compensation of management has gone off the rails. If tenure at the top is shortening- as it is- then pushing your stock price performance helps for a two to three-year period helps you as the manager.

Yet it really is simply “kicking the future down the road” for others to deal with, if it is not too late. It is very unlikely these buybacks will help the performance of the company over a decade but then again most management has ‘cashed in their chips by then.

Simply too much cash and buy-backs are stopping innovation and new growth

Now of course if this ‘bull market’ does come to the end of its run this year as many are predicting then the ‘game’ of improving financial ratio’s gets so much harder. Buybacks do reduce the assets on the balance sheet (cash is an asset), the return on assets (ROA) increases and if the shares bought back are ‘retired’ the return on equity (ROE) equally goes up.

Today our markets and the investors view higher ROA and ROE as the greater positive over the need to invest in the promise of a better future.

Yet change is stirring, new business models are revolutionizing industries, crazy ideas will be creating new markets and this call of the unknown holds an interesting promise of future ‘higher’ returns. The Darwinian effect is raising its head and innovation holds one big key to evolving differently to manage in these changing times.

Are these prop-up ratios providing short-term relief, holding strategies to what would otherwise be an ailing stock from poor investment in innovation or new assets or helping them get out of excessive dilution? These signal a company struggling.

The reluctance to raise capital investment has left companies with the oldest plants and equipment in almost 60 years. The average age of fixed assets reached 22 years in 2013, the highest level since 1956, according to annual data compiled by the Commerce Department.

Do you recall the Capitalists Dilemma?

I am sure many of you can recall the article in the HBR “The Capitalist’s Dilemma” by Clayton M. Christensen and Derek van Bever from the June 2014 Issue.

This is where they outline the three types of innovation 1) Performance-improving innovations replace old products with new and better models 2) Efficiency innovations help companies make and sell mature, established products or services to the same customers at lower prices and 3) Market-creating innovations, our third category; transforming more complicated or costly products so radically that they create a new class of consumers or a new market.

We are today often failing to create the market-creating innovations. Market-creating innovations need capital to grow—sometimes a lot of capital and risk and this is deemed unhealthy in today’s more uncertain environment but you are ‘creating’ lots of cash by running lean.

Buybacks are safer, the risks lower and top management projects their confidence that this is better for shareholder wealth. Shareholders take the money but over time I would certainly argue lose confidence in a lasting future and constantly switch shares to chase the cash! So shares get propped up even more and the circle starts again and the future gets sacrificed just that little bit more.

The Capital Dilemma article was suggesting the need for a New Orthodoxy of New Finance.

It does recommend the emancipating of management. “Many managers yearn to focus on the long-term but don’t think it’s an option. Because investors’ median holding period for shares is now about 10 months, executives feel pressure to maximize short-term returns. Many worries that if they don’t meet the numbers, they will be replaced by someone who will. The job of a manager is thus reduced to sourcing, assembling, and shipping the numbers that deliver short-term gains”

Re-evaluating differently

While we value innovation alongside non-innovation in the same way the demands for returns on investment place unfair demands on internal innovation projects. Investing in the future is so much harder and while there is this lack of confidence in new innovation, alongside this lack of external pressure for different judgements, we are looked into that diminishing short-term viewpoint dominating our boardrooms.

Hopefully, if this present bull market does end, innovation, the source for new growth, alongside greater mergers and acquisitions (M&A) suddenly gets its ‘growing’ voice back in the boardrooms. Suddenly corporate behaviour moves from financial prudence and cash becomes released for accelerating real expansion.

We have lacked the right type of investment in the future

I just wonder if those at the top really understand that it is not just cash that will ‘create’ innovation when they require it when they have that sudden need to chase for real growth if the stock markets suddenly turn against them? This acceleration and sources of new growth come from driving new innovation.

If they have not been sustaining investments in their resources; their assets and their people and we know these have been far more diluted through this pursuit of lean management, dispersing most of the gains with the cash piles achieved, then the company is in real trouble.

They might soon realize that real innovation and the skills needed have been running on ’empty’ or just the past fumes of low-octane incremental fuel, with little sustaining power, apart from this propping up the short-term.

This sudden realization might create a sheer sense of scrabbling. A scrabble just to regain those forgotten skills and bring real lasting health back into our companies where people are valued again for what they can bring.

It would be nice to see a pursuit of growth back on the agenda, through pushing all the buttons needed surrounding innovation, and to see top management really earning their place, unearthing future opportunities for real growth, something shareholders will be increasingly looking to see.

Risk and opportunity are the ‘yin and yang’ for innovation and when you are looking to really grow to give really valuable shareholder return then top management is going to have to re-learn much.

“Recognizing the power of ‘yin and yang for innovation’ can give you the order of things and how and why they relate to each other. Complementary and conflicting opposites do contribute to a greater innovation understanding but they do need consistent attention to manage”

It is critically important to have this ‘flow and balance’ and allow it to constantly evolve.

Let’s get back to investments that are about the future and that need a healthier appetite for innovation investments.

The post Is all investment about the future? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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 for innovation requires commitment across a whole range of structure, creating conditions, adapting or designing new systems, processes and providing clear governance. Senior executives need to understand innovation is often far more frustrating than most executives imagine it to be and a awful lot of hard work. Innovation is very demanding but the rewards can be spectacular in new growth, improved earning and organizations ‘sense of pride and identification’.

There are no best practice solutions to fall back on for your specific organizations to seed and cultivate innovation, a trap many fall into. You don’t switch innovation on or off to meet short term needs, it is certainly not faddish, innovation is simply, a or the, core driver of growth, future performance and your valuation barometer.

The innovation buck in responsibility for innovation is firmly at the top.

The innovation buck stops at the top, it will not work in just being ‘pushed down’ the organization. It is the role senior executives  must fill for achieving a greater innovation success.

If the leadership of the organization fail to formally integrate innovation into the core of any strategic- management agenda where it ‘constantly runs through’ the decision making process innovation will remain disappointing in its impact. Our leaders need to explicitly lead and manage, they need to close the gap between aspiration and execution where everyone up and down the organization can feel more confident that innovation is a core focus and needs developing.

It is against this clear observation from our and many others research initiatives, that the place to focus is getting the leadership to fully understand their key role and engage in innovation, to make it a central core to their own destiny, in top and bottom results.

So our opening thoughts in the white paper on this leadership void.

Here’s a vital question to answer that will make a difference to your organization’s survival: which individual in your organization is most important for innovation success? Many people will argue it is the most creative person in the company, the individual with the best ideas. Others will argue that it is the person who can make the idea a reality.

Perhaps these answers are true in entrepreneurial companies or very small firms, but these responses aren’t true in larger organizations. In larger organizations we believe the CEO or another empowered senior executive is the most important person for innovation success, since they have the ability to:

• link innovation to strategy, and
• create focus, engagement and passion for innovation, and
• direct funds and resources to good innovation programs, and
• speed good ideas to market as new business models, products and services, and
•  ensure the processes and metrics exist so innovation is sustainable.

In mid-sized and large companies, leadership and engagement from CEOs and senior executives are vital to innovation success. What’s more, these leaders want innovation to happen, more consistently, more purposefully and with better result.

Not only do CEOs and executives want innovation, they demand innovation to drive organic growth, profits and create differentiation. We know this because you’ve made it clear. In survey after survey the vast majority of CEOs report that innovation is one of their top three priorities. Yet the gap between “saying and doing” indicates a gap between vision and implementation. The consequences of this gap are significant:

• Poor execution of innovation goals
• Failure to achieve strategic goals
• Limited organizational design to sustain innovation
• The growth of disbelief or cynicism when innovation isn’t pursued.

We also believe CEOs and senior executives play a vital role in the success or failure of innovation.

Unfortunately, those roles haven’t been well-defined. Since the roles are poorly defined, they are rarely well executed. It’s not enough for executives simply to demand more innovation – senior executives must demonstrate links between corporate strategy and the work of innovation, between their vision and the activities necessary to create new products and services and between their expectations and the actual culture of the organization.

Executives fail to fill this vital role when they:

• are unaware of the role,
• don’t understand the importance of their role,
• delegate the role to others who don’t have the power to execute the role, or
• under-perform in the role.

Understanding the importance of innovation, and the barriers that innovation will encounter, helps define key activities an innovation senior executive must undertake, and what he or she must do to fill the role effectively. This leads to an important question: if innovation is strategically important, and if engaged senior executives are critical to innovation success, what keeps executives from filling the role effectively?

There are a number of reasons why executives have difficulty filling an innovation leadership role,including:

• Lack of innovation experience
  • Concern about short-term financial reporting goals
  • Difficulty managing “important” versus “urgent” tasks
  • Difficulty converting their vision into reality
  • Lack trusted innovation tools and frameworks
  • Unaware of the level of resistance and inertia
  • Concerned about upsetting the status quo

Many senior executives lack innovation experience. They often move into their positions through excellent financial management, cost cutting or other demonstrated operational successes. Thus, they lack innovation experience and are unfamiliar with its methodologies, tools and frameworks and often have few trusted sources for well-tested methods and insights.

Innovation is especially challenging because it is so unfamiliar, so potentially disruptive and yet so important. Innovation requires change that can impact the status quo and disrupt the firm’s ability to achieve short-term financial goals. Only an engaged, committed senior executive can create a sustained innovation capability or discipline, yet many lack experience, tools and awareness of the importance of the role.

The seven essential capabilities for innovation leadership

Understanding the innovation environment critical to innovation success led us to identify seven essential capabilities that senior executives must provide in order to fill those roles effectively. These relate to skills, capabilities and the capacities for innovation to thrive.

These include:

• creating alignment,

• deploying trusted methods and tools,

• effective communication and engagement,

• empowering people, providing skills,

• refocusing attitudes, perspectives and rewards ,

• defining a corporate “governance” for innovation

Leaders can drive innovation through thoughtfully designing the strategic innovation framework.

This initial White Paper became the prelude to the Executive Innovation Work Mat. The Work Mat, which provides a unique examination of the executive’s role in innovation, it helps executives understand the vital role they must play for innovation to succeed, and provide a framework that companies can adopt to ensure linkages between strategy and innovation, innovation and capabilities, innovation and culture.

More can be read on this website to extend your understanding of the work mat, for example.

For innovation to really take hold and become a sustaining and systematic function, it is for the leadership of our organizations to become strategically engaged, by providing the framework, the guidance, the direction and necessary top management commitment to ‘make this happen.’

Lastly leaders in organizations, big or small, need a lot of help in working all of the implications through, believe me……and many others fed up with leaders disappointment when they fail to fully engage in strategic framing approaches and making the time and the commitments themselves !

The post The role senior executives must fill for innovation success first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

What is so remarkable about innovation is that it can be highly dynamic.  It’s a task that anyone could do, given the time, education, clarity of purpose and commitments from our organizations, those that recognize the true understanding of the contribution all their people can potentially make towards innovation.

Today, too few people are actually allowed to work on innovation activities, yet the outcomes are ones that everyone wants, and certainly want to be part of. We all want that sense of belonging, of working on or in something that is exciting, dynamic and forward-looking.

We really do need to find ways to allow innovation to be part of each person’s daily jobs. Having a sense of purpose to improve or change something through innovation is such a powerful enabler.

Getting from where we are today, seemingly bogged down in many of the legacies of past innovation understanding, seems to me something we must tackle sooner than later also.

There is no time like the present to overhaul the existing innovation thinking and upgrade it with a faster, more focused innovating machine that yields greater returns due to this overhaul .

We do, in many of our larger organizations,  still seem to have a real reluctance to make the really investments needed, for building more robust innovation systems and structures. Why is that?

Often we even can’t adopt a basic common approach to innovation as a minimum and this will continue to limit all the ‘promise’ that is surrounding innovation. Innovation remains often poorly aligned and isolated, still disconnected from much that is going on within our organizations, where it can make such a contribution.

The choice is the innovation express train or the one that ‘stops’ at all stations.

Recognising some of market challenges and their implications that are coming rapidly towards us we have choices. We can jump on the innovation express train as long as we make a higher investment.

Of course we can take the easier, cheaper option of following along, on that slow all station stopping train, which jogs along, getting further and further behind that faster one speeding out into the distance.

The problem is, far too many organizations decide to save their money and not invest in a more promising future where innovation can take them, they stay locked in the present.

When they realize, often they have left it far too late to arrive at any ‘growth and opportunity’ destination, they have found themselves shoved into a side track while the express passes them by.

Some of their wiser competitors have already arrived and often well on their way on different journeys of exploration and discovery. These were made possible by investing in the right understanding of all the connections needed and knowing clearly the reasons for those chosen destinations.

Some of those competitors were looking out of the window of the express train as it passed wondering why you are not ready to connect into this train and still standing still, waiting. They recognized the potential advantage in investing in innovation.

Buying the innovation train ticket you have the choice of classes. There is ‘just’ incremental innovation but you might want to explore the more radical, breakthrough and business model opportunities that are requiring different innovation capabilities and skills. By making the appropriate investment, experimentation and exploration the innovation journey has a potential for sustaining a real momentum.

What are the implications of not advancing in innovation understanding?

We do need to rethink how innovation fits within the organization. If not then we will never achieve innovation’s real potential and we will be left simply standing in those less important places or me-too organizations watching as the innovation express train rushes past, heading for growth and opportunities for those who have the innovation ticket.

A ticket paid for by building the right innovation capabilities, capacities and competencies to make success happen. A 1^st class ticket where the new routines are sustaining ones, aligned to strategy, built on sound foundations and practices that give you the inside track to better innovation destinations.

The willingness to explore

We need this growing willingness to explore the different types of innovation and deepen the understanding of what each type can provide as a deliberate policy is altering the competitive landscape even more in the chase for growth.

Establishing the right approach, and experimenting to learn what can become the right business proposition in its design is becoming a ‘must have’ skill in evaluation and execution. We need to adapt, be agile and flexible, we need to have a clear sense (and understanding) of the worth of innovation.

Where is your organization?

So is your organization still sitting on the slow train or is finally recognizing the value of investing for a faster growth and business prospect by jumping on the innovation express.

To allow the innovation train within your organization to move onto the mainline, that faster track, to growth and new business opportunities that offer new jobs, you need to make a sustaining commitment to understanding ‘what makes up innovation’ in its capabilities, competencies and capacity to exploit all its value-generating points.

There is a growing hope we are in the final death throes of the older organization regarding innovation, treating it as not mainstream but isolated and disconnected.

Innovation should be a core competence. Investing in innovation offers the future, it allows you to speed up your activities and get to the destination of your customers’ needs a lot more effectively as well as potentially offer more of an exciting experience for those aboard.

This is certainly the time to jump on the innovation express.

The post Innovation can be so remarkable if we can fully embrace it first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.