Achieving innovation engagement - Building Your Innovation Intelligence

Reducing our dependency on others innovation best practices is essential

best-practices

I often wonder if “best practice” is actually a hidden drug within our organizations that everyone simply craves and are constantly taking. We are addicted to it and it is high time to get off this habit. We need to kick this best practice out of our thinking, it is just wrong.

Why do so many advisory organizations promote best practice? Simply because those in the organization constantly feel under pressure to demonstrate why they are falling behind or keeping ahead of their competitors.

They crave knowing best practices, but tell me what really is the best practice of others achieving? Continue reading “Reducing our dependency on others innovation best practices is essential”

Recognizing your types of innovation leadership

Recognizing your innovation leadership style Often innovation succeeds or fails by the personal involvement and engagement of a ‘selected’ few. Recognizing the types of innovation leadership might help you manage the innovation work a little better.

So can you recognize the traits of your innovation leader?

Are they a front-end or back-end innovation leader? Here’s how you can begin to spot the difference. Continue reading “Recognizing your types of innovation leadership”

Exploring Diffusion and Adoption of New Innovation – Part 3

dealing-with-darwin One of my favorite books is “Dealing with Darwin– how great companies innovate at every phase of their evolution” written by Geoffrey Moore. When you work through his other books and connected thinking of “Crossing the Chasm” and “Inside the Tornado” you really appreciate the learning stories coming out of his study of the Technology Adoption Life-Cycle.

We all need to rethink a lot as the new challenges come rushing towards us. In his work, Geoffrey Moore talks about ‘traction’ and I think this is a great word for thinking about how to gain diffusion and adoption in product, service or business models, to gain market and customer acceptance.

Marketing departments talk penetration, “message penetration, market penetration” and so often ‘force’ customers to become aware and then buy. Does this really work today? I doubt it. Also, many organizations hang on to old media ways to get their message across when the use of technology, the internet, and social engagement may seem harder but I believe is far more rewarding to engage with the customer on a more personalized basis. I regard this as 1 to 1 of many. Continue reading “Exploring Diffusion and Adoption of New Innovation – Part 3”

Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation

Being surronded Finally, I am completely surrounded. I have that feeling of being somewhat overwhelmed, I can’t twist and turn anymore, it simply will not go away. Do I throw myself off the building or decide to listen a little longer? It really is forcing me to think.

Today it seems whenever I pick up a business book each chapter has a section on it. Also, I seem not to be able to not fall over all the articles extolling its virtues, I mindlessly Google it and you can see your whole life flash before you if you decided to investigate this seriously.

What am I talking about? Well, nothing other than Design Thinking. I know, most of you are so heavily into this you feel you might as well ‘flip’ over to the next article but are you, really?

Design thinking is a mindset Continue reading “Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation”

Exploring Diffusion and Adoption of New Innovation – Part 2

The future of our engagements will determine diffusion and adoption

It is all about letting go but grabbing more

Technology has opened up the door to both scale and fragmentation and social business is the one pushing through this open door. We are increasingly facing the Collaborative Economy everywhere we turn. Social business is becoming the denominator of success or failure.

New rules are emerging – you could say new theories – and where are these fitting within the corporate mindset?

The shift of what our customer means to us, are we still competing with them, pushing them to accept a value proposition that forces them to begin to look elsewhere?

Are we still determined to hang onto control, in the (mistaken) belief we know what is best for our customers? Continue reading “Exploring Diffusion and Adoption of New Innovation – Part 2”

Exploring Diffusion and Adoption of New Innovation – Part 1

crossing-the-chasm

According to Professor Clayton Christensen and drawn from his book “Seeing What’s Next: Using the Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change, by Clayton M. Christensen, Scott D. Anthony, and Erik A. Roth. Harvard Business School Press, the only way to look into the future is to use theories.

“The best way to make accurate sense of the present, and the best way to look into the future, is through the lens of theory.” The theory of innovation helps to understand the forces that shape the context and influence natural decisions.

This might not be fashionable for many because as soon as you introduce “theory” into the discussion for many of my practical colleagues they want to dismiss it. Continue reading “Exploring Diffusion and Adoption of New Innovation – Part 1”

Exploring the criteria for collaborative innovation

identification

The shape of our collaboration activities has been radically changing in recent years. The combination of technology, the internet, resource constraints and opening up of innovation to the outside world has changed the shape and content of conversations. Shaping conversations can be either intentional or through serendipity. Ideas are usually never fully formed but emerge over these conversations from fragments that need nurturing, encouraging, aligning and developing through ongoing conversations. Often the fragments need a wider network to come together and form around.

sharpen-ideas-quickly The push today is the ability to sharpen the ideas quickly and move into some early testing and validation, ideally with the final customer somehow engaged and then from this ‘interaction’ the idea shapes and its final understanding deepens onto a concrete delivery. There is a growing need for more radical, out of the existing box innovation to tap into. Collaborators help here. Continue reading “Exploring the criteria for collaborative innovation”

Are you opening up the Stage Gates to let the new innovating world in?

clearing-hurdles

Surprisingly the Stage-Gate concept was created in the 1980’s and led to Robert G Cooper’s different evolutions of this evolving and absorbing many new practices and experiences gained by different organizations across this time. Let’s reflect on this, as the Stage-Gate process is still very much alive, although it has been adapted increasingly to fit individual organizations but does it fit the test of time in today’s faster-paced, more risk-needed world of innovation?

There is no question the Stage-Gate process has had a significant impact on the conception, development, and launch of new products. Yet there have been consistent criticisms as the world of innovation has moved on. Today it is faster-paced, far more competitive, and global and becomes less predictable.

The cries of the Stage-Gate process as being too linear, too rigid and far too planned, bordering on prescriptive have all been offered up. The gates are too structured and the constant ‘creep’ of the controlling bureaucracy surrounding it in paperwork, checklists and justification have simply led to so much non-value-added work.

How does it survive, is it because there is nothing else to take its place? Continue reading “Are you opening up the Stage Gates to let the new innovating world in?”

Innovation Formula- Intensity and Purpose

The Innovation Accelerator Model Formula by Agility Innovation

The innovation accelerators model – I often am coming back to this as the formula for building intensity into your innovation activity.

I have been arguing that you can have a unique model for some time. I think the way I have it structured is it is a formula for an innovation acceleration model.

I think it is worth working through, it seems to move with the times of what we need to focus upon.

Continue reading “Innovation Formula- Intensity and Purpose”

Risk Aversion Makes Us Feel Ordinary

When did we lose the appetite for risk? Innovation is suffering badly from our present risk adverse approach. Risk-taking has become threatening, we are all ‘fixated’ on covering all the downsides of risk, looking more at the possibilities of loss and less so at all the possibilities of success

So, we end up with “mediocre work within a mediocre company” yet it was not previously like that. Risk aversion had become dominating and the organization’s leadership was signaling “they were really more comfortable being ordinary”.

How does that square off with “we want to be highly innovative, it is important to us, our growth and delivering ongoing value to our shareholders and to our customers depends on us being innovative”.

Continue reading “Risk Aversion Makes Us Feel Ordinary”