As we look to enter into 2016 what is top of mind for innovation to take hold and become the real core within our business organizations?

Some of my quick thoughts or repeating mantras, no apologies here:

• Innovation is not the preserve of the (selected) few but the domain of the community, it is encouraging our connections to actually connect and exchange mutual value and knowledge.
• Moving innovation from just being symbolic to essential. We must stop dipping our toes in the water, we need to just jump in and get wet. We need to get everyone involved and wanting to contribute engaged and  excited on where innovation can really take us
• Recognizing innovation is traversing functions, entities and boundaries faster than ever. Find ways to get out of the way to allow it to flow where the energy goes and then ‘attempt’ to capture it for the good of all.

• Keep opening the Enterprise to external knowledge. Keep breaking down those barriers of resistance to allow this openness to further take hold, expand and contribute into your everyday thinking. Make the “network effect” really mean something in results

• Collaboration is formed at the hip with Co-creation. Making sure you are extracting your fair share of value from all these exchanges.

• Design is increasing to the fore in many organizations. We don’t need to over work it or push it beyond its limit. We do need to blend it in and fuse it with other techniques, so to sort out where it fits within the innovation mix and valuing it for its ‘added’ worth to transform information into achieving tangible outcomes

• We need to explore, experiment, prototype, adapt, become more agile, keep it lean, pivot on new learning and anything else that helps us to speed up the process and keep learning and churning.

• The combining of great design and appropriate functionality is giving your customers what they need and feel good about, it is a powerful combination to achieve and never forget to aspire to achieve in all you offer.

• Platforms and ecosystems are emerging to manage complex innovation challenges and knowing where and how you can fit into these to extract more are essential but it is a learning game for most of us to explore. Do this with a real conscious effort to leverage its exciting promise.

• The bottom of the pyramid is a place we continue to forget and others learn to play in and master its needs. It is very relevant in today’s more cost-conscious market conditions and provides the emerging understanding of what helps resolve ‘jobs-to-be-done’ and deliver to different market needs.

• The power of social innovation and linking your product to societal needs Scaling becomes important to expand this out. We need to “reconnect to dominant economic activities of the larger society”, add a ‘higher’ purpose to our innovation activity.

• Reverse innovation and its ability to be re-scaled to adapt across different markets is equally a valuable source of growth within organizations. We do need to learn from not only others what is actually possible so a product can enter previously untapped markets but what we can do to reduce ‘’bloat and complexity within our own product offerings.

• We will continue to probe and search for a different organizational design, even further away from the linear process of cause and effect that has dominated much of the 20th-century thinking and how we can have a ‘dual’ thinking around exploitation and exploration. Innovation design needs both.

• Of course, the raw power of technology and all things digital with all the data flowing in continues to dominate much of our thinking presently, yet it continues to need a clear focus on its use and understanding, as well as having in place the systems and analytic capabilities we need internally to process these insights and extract the value.

Whatever is achieved to move the innovation needle in the year ahead, it is going to require focused leadership, a clear innovation alignment to the strategy being pursued, along with a climate and environment conducive to allowing the encouragement of ideas that can be translated into new commercial or social value, valued by customers or markets as solving their problems

We all need to ‘advance’ innovations position within our collective thinking, our growth and future well-being are increasingly reliant on it to deliver solutions to even more complex problems. or improve on the existing, ones in more imaginative and environmentally friendly ways.

Wishing you a cracking innovating time in 2016

Adapted from a post on LinkedIn on December 27th 2015.

The post Moving innovation even more in 2016 first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Following on from my last post suggesting the way to move innovation forward, it was to ‘take the different innovation hills, one at a time, for innovation advancement” I used a military metaphor of “taking the hills”.

So what are the hills we need to take?

 There are plenty of innovation hills to attack but here are ten suggestions that would advance the cause of innovation and establish its territorial importance in the organization somewhat.

Some hills maybe on first glance, seem not so important but they all move towards setting up the winning conditions for innovation to become a core within organizations. Some are sending clear signals of intent; others show the fighting commitment necessary to take that hill because it is strategically important.

Hill one is by abandoning quarterly reporting

Thank heavens there are organizational leaders beginning to push back on the obsessive need of reporting results every three months. A number of multinational businesses, such as Google, Unilever, Coca-Cola and National Grid have signalled the end for Quarterly Reporting in order to halt short-term relationships with investors. This is such a psychological hill to regain to signal a better focus on the longer-term,

Steve Holliday, CEO of energy company National Grid PLC, recently stated quarterly reporting encouraged short-term thinking and behaviour, stating, “Chief Executives and investors must move beyond financial value as the only recognised metric of business success.”

Unilever CEO, Paul Polman, when announcing Unilever’s approach to reporting, “If you buy into this long-term value creation model, which is sustainable, then come and invest with us. If you don’t buy into this, I respect you as a human being, but don’t put your money in our company.”

The second hill is trying to regain stability in organizations leadership

Let’s get some stability at the top of our organizations. Through this focus on longer-term value creation it might allow the C-level a better chance at considering the strategic effects of ‘rushed, responding to the short-term’ can bring. They need motivated people and the limited talent will go elsewhere if they feel the conditions laid out are too risky and uncertain.

Stability in leadership and strategic direction are important to innovation, The tenure of CEO’s has got dangerously short and as they have become increasingly incentivised to gain their reward on their time in the job with a direct consequence that more radical innovation gets ignored or relegated.

Hill three to take- making innovation not just the addition to the day job.

Innovation to really work, to become sustaining, has to be integrated and central to the daily job. Innovation needs to lead each person’s thinking. Let’s do away with those often separate focused activities of managing (exclusively) through efficiency and effectiveness and add in innovation. Innovation should not be a ‘bolt on’ afterthought, it needs integrating into each person’s daily role.

Hill four- stopping the fad and fashion of innovation

How often do we hear that innovation is in our top three priorities yet leadership is concerned over their innovation success rates? Innovation swings through this fad, popular to trot out when needed and pushed back when times require ‘swinging’ cost cuts. These cuts take out any slack within the system, freeze the hell out of what is left and then the leadership can’t understand the lack of commitment, of trust, of engagement.

This hill is vital to capture and plant the flag of innovation to announce it has become a core driver of growth, performance and valuation and we will hold this hill at whatever cost.

Hill five- the ability to understand and stimulate innovation

Survey after survey senior executives are only “somewhat”, “a little” or “concerned” in the decisions they are making around innovation. What does explain this gap between aspirations and eventual execution? Innovation as a force is hard to build but it becomes impossible, if you do not immerse yourself in it. To sustain innovation you need to create ongoing capabilities, then scale to build the momentum of overwhelming forces that deliver lasting impact around innovation.

Hill six. There are no best-practice solutions, this is full of booby traps.

Those organizations that rush to copy others simply forget they are uniquely different. Simply copying and being selective on taking others best practices enables those others to always be ahead. What you think is a best practice has most probably moved on. If you are busy chasing your competitor to get ahead you have to change this best practice crutch and exchange this for more modern fighting equipment.

Base your own practice on ‘good’ practice, or ‘emerging’ practice and explore ‘novel’ practice with greater confidence. These allow you to  scan the practice horizon but intelligently assessing the terrain in better, more adaptive ways, to see what you can learn to deploy to give you your advantage. Avoid the best practice hill, you will find it full of booby traps that will ‘bog’ you down in your longer-term advancement if you blindly stumble onto this hill.

Hill seven- taking explicit steps to foster an innovation culture

Creating the conditions, the environment for innovation to take hold allows for growing trust and increasing commitment. If executives listen to their people’s ideas and value them, it brings growing trust; it pulls individuals together in a collective identity. This offers more as an innovation culture of trust than monetary incentives. People go that extra yard, push their bodies and go to extremes if they believe.

Hill eight- Ensuring you have a formal integrated innovation plan

Approaching innovation in an ad-hoc fashion delivers occasional success and the potential for plenty of failures. By integrating innovation fully into the strategic management agenda, in the vast majority of senior level meetings encourages a more structured approach to innovation. Innovation should be consistently managed, tracked and assessed as a core element of an organizations strategic agenda. This is a hill that provides that essential higher ground.

Hill nine- senior leaders need to explicitly lead the innovation battle.

If the leadership of organizations is not seen to be explicitly leading and fully involved and committed to innovation it sends the wrong signal to the troops. Being visible, being engaged, and being as committed to taking the innovation battle on makes a world of difference.

Hill ten- Winning the hearts and minds of all those around you

The failure within organizations is that innovation is foremost a peoples game. All the technology, processes, frameworks mean nothing unless there is utter engagement and commitment in what we do. To protect and encourage people that make bold decisions signals the fear of failure is part and parcel of innovation. Encouraging behaviour of ‘wanting innovation’ inspires trust and belief.

Winning the battle for innovation

Laying out the conditions, explaining the context, communicating the ground rules and governance gives a sense of clarity. By knowing the objectives, the taking of all these different hills becomes easier. Who is leading your charge, what hills does your organization need to take to give innovation the liberating effect it deserves?

The post Taking on those innovation hills is never easy first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

How do we move innovation forward? We need to see this as a battle of hearts and minds, of overcoming dogma and fixed mindsets, using skirmishes to advance the innovation advancement. We need to break out of entrenched positions and lead innovation forward.

Many people feel innovation is an uncomfortable place, it often is at the edge, it deals in both opportunity and risk, it is uncertain to commit to joining the innovation battle. Sadly the majority working within our organizations do not understand innovation, it is too intangible, it seems shrouded in mysteries, yet it offers challenge, excitement and satisfaction. To achieve ‘something’ is highly motivating.

We firstly need to mobilize around innovation

To mobilize the organizations troops you have to give them objectives, they need to identify and be given a clear understanding of the ‘cause and its effect’. Over time they can recognize the positive effects and begin to understand the consequences if they don’t join in and engage.

Let me use a military metaphor, in war for this post.

Achieving advantage it is necessary to take the high ground away from others, “to take the hill”. This is always a costly operation, both because an attacker usually suffers from this ‘push’ and because it is more difficult to attack uphill and take someone else’s hill or advantage point.

The uphill battle for innovation is not an easy one

Innovation is in an uphill fight to gain the high ground and provide the strategic advantage that this will eventually bring, if it is sustaining and well executed. To help in this our leaders have to decide the strategic framework for advancing innovation.

The approach and the eventual strategy needs to lay out what the intent is, it needs to define the objectives. Any clear statement needs to state where the business is headed in the long term and how innovation will contribute. It should include major goals and milestones, as well as how resources and assets are going to be deployed. It needs a real comprehensive innovation battle plan.

Planning our innovation battle requires the taking of different hills

This plan or framework needs to be simple, clear, credible, motivating and it reflects the uniqueness of the organization to achieve the innovations needed. We need to see this as taking one hill at a time, tactics may change but each new hill taken signals advancement and provide better conditions to ‘think’ innovation with growing confidence.

Each hill might be just one mission in the overall innovation strategy. The role of our organization’s leader is ensuring they are putting strategy into practice by constructing and then communicating where do we want to get to and how are we going to get there.

We need to take each hill one at a time and then to secure it to gain a lasting position for innovation

Innovation does not happen overnight, it takes time and preparation. It takes dedicated commitment. We need to advance ‘one hill at a time’.

So what are the hills we need to take?

Any thoughts, I’m going over a few suggestions in my next post? Some are establishing strategic change, some are to stabilize positions and some are to push out and establish the strategic advantage. Others hills need to be established so organizations can build capabilities, then mobilize theses to deploy innovation in structured ways.

amended -broken into two posts for ease of reading

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“Innovation is the pathway to travel and seek out our future”

Today there is as much of a gap between the aspiration to innovate and the ability to deliver on this.

We still continue to ignore the constant suggestion that innovation should be systematic so the organization can provide some degree of reliability to innovate in a continuous fashion.

We often allow the concept of ‘holistic’ to simply float over us and ignore the intimate connection between strategic thinking, innovation and their alignment. It is still sad we seem not to go beyond a certain point in our innovation thinking, it continues along a narrow path of limited understanding. Will it ever change?

I appreciate the statement, I think made by John Kao: “Strategy is useless without innovation, innovation is directionless without strategy”. Innovation can be a strategy catalyst but is it still? I really do believe we need a new sense of the scale and scope of innovation; we do need to get a firmer grip on its complexities.
I would certainly suggest we do need to align it far more to the organizations strategic imperative and recognize innovation’s role in this for this to be successful and to be repeatable. We must strive and push for more of a complete understanding of the innovation process to manage this thoroughly.

Firstly innovation is never linear; it is iterative with lots of trial and error to learn from it.

Innovation leadership needs to step up to the plate and deliver.
Innovation leaders need to develop and execute an end-to-end innovation process that encourages discovery more, better screening and assessing earlier on to move discovery into exploration and concept generation that ‘fits’ with the strategy.

The process today needs to manage ideas into conversion for profit and growth at increasing speed as well, it is demanded. Innovation is not an ad hoc process as many still see it, that eureka moment, innovation is a massively important strategic business process.

We need to treat it as tackling an enterprise transformation designed to bring consistency into the thinking around innovation. It needs to cross functional boundaries, it has to transform current sub optimized silo’s that gets ‘richer’ through exchange, interface and learning from others and not dumped down as often is the case today.

To make it work you need a common language and a common approach well understood by the innovation leader designated to deliver.

My last blog dealt with the new extended innovation funnel, with the argument that ideas that enter the internal organizations innovation process are actually in the middle of the process. Let me expand on this ‘extending’ a little more by discussing some of the parts of the innovation value chain that need to be thought through.

Extending innovations value- appreciating the whole system.

For me innovation needs to be treated more like a complete interlinked value chain. We must step back and see the whole value chain system for innovation. It constantly loops back and feeds back-in to add increasing value and experience.

It has many connected parts that need to work together to deliver effectively and efficiently the new ideas and concepts being discovered through to final commercialization.

The innovation value chain needs the following, seemingly obvious and often missed:

1. An established system that is clearly repeatable to ‘push’ innovation constantly
2. It needs to be able to scale, scope and quickly adjust according to the concepts being pushed or even pulled through, often by spotting unmet customer needs.
3. It needs flexibility, resilience and adaptability that constantly adjusts and is shaped accordingly and cannot be ‘fixed’, rigid and overly managed or controlled as many seem to try.
4. It needs to have breakpoints for considering the innovation options- carry on, kill off, spin out, send back to rethink, to allow to grow at a different pace, to accelerate more.
5. It needs to ‘capture’ the collective learning and experiences constantly gained from the past and build those into improving the process for future activities
6. The people who have ‘oversight’ need to have some form of option resolution built-in for deciding resources, directions, allocations and investments. They need that responsibility.
7. All innovation ideas and concepts entering the extended tunnel need to align to the strategic direction, compliment or extend onto the platforms you are providing (core, adjacent or new) and feed the portfolios that drive the business’s growth aspirations.
8. They must have a clear ‘fit’ within the strategy needs and be resourced well.

Designing the innovation pathway

To achieve increasing value in this, there is an innovation pathway you have to design and be ready to travel.

It is highly dynamic and you, as the leader of the innovation activities, are required to constantly add the active innovation yeast by promoting the ‘fermentation’ needed for innovation to succeed, including:

1. Establishing and encouraging a robust set of innovation processes and technologies to support that constantly adapts and adjusts to the needs of the innovation concept, not the other way around.
2. The ability, energy and commitment to drive maturing ideas and concepts to realization.
3. Create a powerful desire and motivation to innovate by encouraging the environment of what you do makes a contribution to our future.
4. As ideas and concepts mature, you constantly build and restate the business case, again and again so it remains clear why this concept remains important.
5. You actively seek out the different and often diverse points of connectivity with all the stakeholders so they can engage, contribute and lend their support and commitment.
6. Constantly look for ways to empower individuals and groups to explore, challenge and improve constantly on what they know with what they need to find out and discover.
7. You have to work actively (hard) at clarifying constantly the links of the idea and concepts across the innovation process for all involved to stay committed to the ‘long run’ between idea to commercialization in times of uncertainty and flux.
8. Ensure you are actively working those networking, encouraging collaborating and building on the collective wisdom of many so that you are constantly exploring all the (emerging) options and expanding on the alternatives to extract maximum value.
9. Seek ways to always measure, evaluate and see return through progress and impact so everyone involved or viewing the efforts can constantly ‘see’ the value and where their contribution is helping, not simply once a year in those organised ways and events that fit the calendar or bean counter needs.
10. Strive for execution that builds from the best of the past by knowing what that is; remain open to what is all around you today in the wider world beyond your often more narrow confines and imagine what is really possible with that extra touch of imagination to ‘push’ by seeing beyond the known’s and traditionally accepted.

The concept-to-customer approach is an innovation pathway that constantly narrows down.

We do need a concept-to-customer approach across innovation. My 5C’s of capture, connect, convert, confirm and conclude shown in the extended innovation funnel can move this along.

Innovation is extremely strategic, it requires a more thoughtful understanding and we have to accommodate it within organizations by stating that it is often unpredictable, sometimes a chaotic process, it cannot be legislated or totally subscribed to, thankfully certain significant parts can.

It is by having this complete understanding of the entire innovation process so we can differentiate between the parts that can be made predictable and those that can’t. We can also constantly work at making innovation more predictable, in managing its many parts by making them more efficient and effective wherever possible.

The more the deeper in innovation insight and understanding, the more we are adding to the internal knowledge. By often allowing for as much flexibility and adaptability for ideas and concepts as possible to ‘travel down’ and consistently improve the narrowing innovation path, the more it is likely to emerge as the right end-result.

As we progress from discovery to execution we need to offer more guidance and encouragement than prescriptive methods, currently prescribed and handed out in ad hoc doses.

We DO need to understand innovation well. We then can manage our core well, expand into any adjacent spaces that strategically fit more comfortably and organize the associated activities to push the right innovation through a pipeline (depicted by the funnel in the previous blog).

We will often have to go a lot nearer to the edge of uncertainty as we build this innovation path but knowing where these edges are is better than being constantly surprised. Innovation expertise inside an organization makes sound sense.

Please see a previous post on some thoughts on this http://bit.ly/fQW6Jq

One last thing here, we must also rather surprisingly, reduce the many existing tools and processes we try to fit around innovation that ‘stress’ the existing core infrastructure but more on these in a further blog might be better.

The post Walking that narrow innovation pathway. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.