Innovation can drive change, change is required.  Without innovation, we progressively die, as we provide no option for change, no prospects of new, different growth. So why does it continually fail to happen?

We innovators certainly need a new model of change, for at least eight important reasons I can think of, that render what we have practiced in the past as obsolete:

1. As innovators we aren’t simply responding to external change, we are creating change, both for customers and for our companies and markets. (the inside, proactive change vs external, reactive impact). The ‘flood’ of data, of customer dialogues is offering us ‘signals’ to explore and seize opportunities by being agile, aware and alert to the new discovery of needs not being fulfilled.

2. External change is far more unpredictable, in global markets new threats emerge from anywhere, at any time and often delivered in totally unexpected ways, through new business models that totally cut through and disrupt the existing positions. They can render the existing obsolete in seemingly rapid time, irrespective of the efforts to respond as they have discovered the unmet need to deliver solutions to it.

3. The pace and nature of change is not slowing down but accelerating and will continue to accelerate at increasing pace, frequency and amplitude of change. Organizations need to pick up the pace, learn to accept a greater risk, experimentation and rapid adjustment on the new knowledge flowing in to build the final outcome to the needs of the market and customer.

4. Sudden rapidly evolving markets make everything needing to be ‘super’ responsive by existing players, to the sudden realization they have missed opportunities, Many existing organizations cannot cope and alter with this demand for agility, flexibility, and responsiveness. They need to (re)learn this and build it into their systems and often this realization comes too late ,they have fossilized.

5. As often demonstrated, most innovation has the potential to be business model innovation, which will require change. As more innovation becomes focused on business model innovation, this will create even more change and challenges.

6. We recognize that change is no longer an occasional threat but a constant companion, so we need to shift from the idea of change as a potential inhibitor into one of developing an ongoing change capacity as part of our unique competitive advantage, evolving and pushing boundaries.

7. The idea that companies can achieve a protected steady state where change won’t affect them doesn’t seem to apply anymore, as long periods of stasis, or standing still, is no longer possible, we must be able to learn to evolve constantly and reflect that more ‘dynamic’ condition.

8. We need to think of change as a capability that we constantly deploy, rather than a threat we typically avoid and fail to understand. We need to develop change as a capability, to build skills, reduce barriers, to extend our capacity and competencies through experimentation and discovery. We need to push out of our comfort zone constantly.

Are we asking ourselves do we recognize our need to change?

How can we focus the energy around the boardroom table on to this linking the future work to the shape and the organization’s needs, making the growing innovation debate as strategic as it can be? One where change becomes a constant, delivered through innovation.

How are we going to design our innovation capabilities, competencies or capacity unless we fully recognize the dramatic changes in business that are now underway and what this needs to be addressed, to allow for a more responsive, fluid, agile and adaptive culture, to flourish and respond so as to generate the better innovation of the future we need.

Recognizing differences

There are different traits, actions and activities to think through. Here are some of the needs:

* We need to build far more serendipity into what we do, also random connections, as well as purposeful discovery, by seeking out increasing connections and engaging in networks of learning and mutual exchange.

* We need ‘safe’ places where we are turning curiosity into reality and building our innovation mental abilities for growth, development, and accomplishment, opening up and having others being receptive and then jointly translating this into new innovation.

* We need to embed into our new innovation core new routines and thinking. It is determining the changes needed by those new combinations of fusion by seeking out the chemistry from all the connections and exchanges, pushing for creative collisions, positive tensions and dynamics to engage fully in innovation, so the culture, climate, and environment are vibrant, challenging and exciting.

* We need to constantly seek the new space from knowledge exploitation and exploration, redefining the organization edges, enlarging and enhancing our understanding.

* We need pushing constantly out, constantly evaluating, discovering and aligning growth options and then seeking out those outcomes that potentially offer the right return on innovation

* We need to place learning into the center, to allow our capability building, new competencies to grow and evolve.

* We need to focus on the constant wish to improve, so as to improve performance and capacities by focusing on both our mental and physical abilities to develop our position and function, to explore, expand and exploit. Each contributes to our ability to receive, hold and absorb new knowledge. We measure these by the increased volume and quality outcomes, others provide back to us.

* We need new structures, attitudes, investment and motivation to change, to focus on innovation building that needs being instilled, drive with a dedicated focus from the top, not just as a commitment that must happen but integrated and aligned with the strategic thinking and planning, worked through a clear pathway of change to achieve a different, core innovation capability.

* We need to determine the abilities to deliver in effective, focused, efficient and aligned ways. Knowing what is important, seeking out the actions to support and deliver the part needed to achieve the desired goals. Adjusting as we go, as we learn, ramping up what is working, dampening down what is clearly not.

* We need to build innovation by working it continuously.  On making our environment into this more evolving, fluid and dynamic one, where the climate and culture of innovation thrive and grows from this constant feeding and attention.

Our innovation problem that never seems to change

Innovation requires increasing agility, flexibility and allowing creativity to flourish on a constant, evolving basis. Today, innovation often stays outside the mainstream system and operational structures, most often to the organization’s detriment, as we simply accept innovation work as something that does not fit the ‘norm’.

Innovation needs to be fluid, open, responsive, adaptive; sometimes reliant on the instinct, hunch or powerful insight that is never ‘predictable’ but suddenly emerges from a collision of events, or random thoughts that lead to a new insight, a game-changing one.

Of course it is really hard to turn this ‘randomness’ or serendipity found in innovation into a system but it is certainly not impossible, as the few who recognize the ‘power’ of innovation continually show in their capacities to innovate, as they recognize they have real growth as there need and innovation, however hard, delivers on this

This is today’s innovation problem, tackling the differences in managing innovation, so often we can’t bring innovation into the very core, it feeds the core but it just never becomes the ‘beating heart’, for many, it seems too hard and disturbs the “business as usual” needs until eventually they implode, wiped from existence, lost in a wistful world of “if only.”

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The post Is innovation really important to you? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I had been looking forward to a nice break up in the mountains of Switzerland, in a place near St.Moritz for five days of some walking, catching up with good friends over some great meals.

The evenings playing different card games or board games, as the temperatures dropped outside to minus six centigrade, the competitive nature raised the inside temperatures significantly. All good plans sometime get disrupted.

Regretfully a few days before, I ‘pulled’ some ligaments around the knee and this rendered the walking to some pretty tame stuff but the company, food and drink seemed to compensated a little I must admit, it eased the pain.

So I had some time on my hands so I decided to go back over the whole area of disruption to get a broader understanding and how this is driving so much within our innovation activity at present.

Disruption is all around us, coming at ever-faster speeds

Disruption has been going on around us over different generations. Something simply disrupts something else, such as the change from the horse and pony to the car, onto trains, then aircraft; or the telegraph replaced by the fixed telephone, then onto the mobile phone; or the mainframe computer to the personal computer onto today’s smartphone. Everything invented seems to have been disrupted or seems about too.

“A disruptive innovation is an innovation that creates a new market and value network and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network, displacing established market leaders and alliances”             – (a wikepedia definition)

The term was defined and the phenomenon really came to a our more collective attention, through some pioneering work of Clayton M. Christensen that began back in 1995. This work highlighted today’s force of change as technology-led to bring out the changing conditions usually found in disruptive innovation occurring all around us today.

As we think ‘disruptive’ we also do need to recognize that no all innovations are disruptive, even if they are revolutionary. Equally Disruptive innovations tends to be produced or driven by outsiders as the incumbent’s fight to keep hold of their established position and regarding changing as simply as too hard with such a legacy of assets established.

It often seems the incumbent only let’s go, often in dramatic fashion, when a disruption has actually taken hold and suddenly takes off or seemingly from nowhere, catching those in established market by stripping away critical points of value within the existing market. They, the incumbent, then struggle to regain any form of leadership mostly, due to this poor recognition and preparation they should have been undertaking on an ongoing basis of exploring and experimenting.

Adopting new business practices is not so simple for the majority

Even though many of the existing incumbent firms of today have some pretty smart people they simply can’t get their heads around often their collective poor-decision making, cumbersome processes, often providing a calcifying culture and lack of bold leadership, that is opening the doors to the many inspiring disruptors.

The established firm have so tightly linked their processes, planning and planning cycles but not evolved increasingly around a higher level of fluidity, agility and extracting from a broader network. They stay resolutely internally focused with this often dominating vested interest in preserving the status-quo wherever they can.

There are so many ‘blind spots’ and lack of understanding about the power and force that technology is enabling. So many are being encouraged to actively work on new ways to enter the game and find a new model that simply disrupts and ‘slices off’ a nice part of the pie, or completely changes the way the equation of price, performance and value can be dramatically altered.

This change in the value proposition results in the consumers growing acceptance to change from the previous accepted and known. It simply shifts the market forces dramatically away and becomes unstoppable, utterly disrupting and altering perceptions and past positions. The application of technology is the catalyst that creates this disruptive process.     .

You feel the only blame is on the incumbent themselves, no wonder the talent entering the employment market are reluctant to join many large established organizations and would prefer to be part of the disruptors, in new ventures and defining and delivering new value propositions, building not defending positions, so as to deliver to customers wanting more ease, convenience and connected value than they are receiving today.

The digital technology led age, with the availability of venture money and extremely savvy techies, seeks to feed off the incumbent’s reluctance to cannibalize the present profitable revenue streams, render existing assets and investments as obsolete and see the fundamental assumptions about the business and the market as different to their own understandings.

The world of managing within a business has changed. This lack of seemingly rigorous internal constant challenging and exploiting alternative positions in real time, and exploring these through experimentation and discovery is rendering many firms unable to adapt and not be as agile and responsive as they could be. They stay often in this constant state of inertia, denial and myopia, even though they, within themselves still feel ‘dynamic and responsive’. A real dilemma that is extremely hard to get right. I feel “restless without consistent experimentation” needs to be embedded within the soul of many organizations.

They, the incumbents, see things in rational ways, based on past experience, whereas the usurper has no inhibitions and can only see inefficiencies, inept understanding of changing customer needs and fat, slow-moving incumbents. We must learn to walk in other peoples shoes to understand and ‘see’ differently.

The new cooking recipe for business disruption.

A light bulb went on for me as I sat there, near St. Moritz reviewing disruptive innovation. I remembered the terrific value we all seemed to have obtained from the pioneering work of Doblin and its ten types of innovation when it came out some years back. This allowed the collective ‘us’ to suddenly see innovations simply beyond products. We were able to combine them in new ways. The ten types of innovation framework took us beyond a stereo-type view of innovation, it opened up our thinking.

 A new framing of connecting disruptive innovation

I see the work currently being undertaken by Deloitte University Press as emerging as another important step, it allows us to frame and think disruption along recognized points of value, old and new. They have defined the nine patterns of disruption as shown in the graphic below. Incidentally the Doblin group is now part of Deliottes.

I think this has a great place to frame your disruptions, no different from the ten types of innovation.

The nine patterns of disruption (according to Deliotte)

Deliotte University Press has been exploring the disruptive forces at work in a “Patterns of Disruption” extended article and then providing a recent case series on these nine patterns of disruption shown above. I urge all worried or simply interested in understanding disruptive innovation to read these as an excellent point of reference. It can become a really powerful starting point to look, explore and determine ‘your’ possible points of disruption

Getting closer to understanding today’s business disruption phenomena

Here we see the basic ingredients for making change in these nine patterns and a new recipe for challenging and making change as ‘relevant markets’ can be redefined, providing a different source of value creation and recognizing that unmet need of the consumer. It might be something as powerful as the ten types of innovation in exploring the disruptive innovation points of value.

It is the new conditions of lower cost of entry and asset light, that technology is putting the potential into the hands of anyone to allow us to re imagine and recombine, to look to eliminate waste, improve choices, offer greater connected convenience, more personalization but on a different scale and scope. It is allowing us to challenge and exploit direct and indirect costs, to reduce lead times, focus upon new response times, to gain new identification and improved relationships, by connecting all the parts differently, that can create a change in finding new creation value points.

Exploring quickly, learning from these, developing the ability to pivot from this new set of insights, to firstly establish a new base line approach that taps into the right conditions and having the ability, resources and confidence to quickly scale this and mature it out into a broader offering of its interconnected parts that keep adding more value. Large established forms can achieve this, no differently than the small and nimble but in different ways, it lies in the art of orchestration, mobilization and clear, resolute commitment.

Becoming hyperaware, taking decisions and executing on these well is a great step forward for many.

We are certainly breaking faster with the past than ever. In the past we saw the future based often on the past, today we must see the future by exploring and experimenting constantly, based on our agility to recombine based on the technological potential we have increasingly available. Although all these have such a short history and are always changing we need to be more at the forefront of this exploring. It is our embracing all forms of this technology revolution that allows us to frame our thinking differently, it alters our thinking constantly and our organizations need to be set up to evolve in the same responsive ways.

We need to build a greater hyperawareness, the ability to detect and monitor changes and that is coming at increasing speed through more data flowing towards us. It is our ability to absorb this and translate its meaning in different, value-added ways to give it new value from a customer and market perspective. We also need to make better informed decision-making and acting upon these through faster execution and these ‘skills’ need to be far better put in place within most organizations. We need to cut through the existing ways of doing business as normal and challenge everything, everywhere, constantly.

We need to think of these ‘forces of disruption’ as the ‘era of displacement’ as we are all caught up in this technology revolution. The headlights are full on and blinding all of us, it is how we quickly respond will give us a better chance of emerging out of this period of (digital) technological revolution. Technology should not disable us, it should be enabling.

The post Caught in the Headlights of Disruptive Innovation. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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You often hear of volatile trading conditions, a more complex market and situations changing constantly and moving faster than ever. ‘Much’ seems to be closing in on us.

We do know we need to re-equip ourselves for constant disruption; we are really beginning to see a shift from the classic bell curve into more of a shark fin for adopting change.

One that is characterized by sudden, even violent success or an event, some moments of brilliant dominance, followed by a dramatic change in conditions as others have spotted the same opportunity and you hit a rapid decline, the race to the bottom of competition constantly negating one another.

Market are segmenting, the life cycle is shortening or having an even longer tail of dealing with slow decline and constant erosion of any competitive position. The sharks are arriving even earlier and in a greater need to show their dominance.

It does seem “creative destruction” is a central force in many of our activities. Activities where innovation is continually replacing not just in products and new services but in designing radically different business models, searching to replace less adaptive competitors in the marketplace at faster rates.

The post The sharks that prey are arriving a lot earlier now first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Of course I am not suggesting this is all our business leaders but I would argue innovation and its ‘make up’ remains a mystery to nearly all our leaders.

They are more than willing to allocate responsibility down the organization, failing to recognize their pivotal role in managing or orchestrating innovation engagement themselves, or even ensuring the mechanisms are fully in place. Why is this?

Time and time again you read one report after another, about the leadership gap in innovation or issues relating to innovation disconnecting from the top of the organization.

You can read reports from Booz, Allen Hamilton, Boston Consulting, the Conference Board, Harvard Business Review, IBM, A T Kearney, A D Little and many others all reporting issues and gaps in connecting innovation at the top of our organizations.

Can they all be wrong, if not then why aren’t our CEO’s listening? Why are we not resolving this and only just keep reporting it?

In March of this year Capgemini Consulting and IESE issued their report called the “Innovation leadership study” and this went deeper than most into the problems.
The study revealed that “the absence of a well-articulated innovation strategy is by far the most important constraint for companies to reach their innovation targets.”

In the report they mentioned not just the lack of many formal mechanisms were missing but the total environment for innovation was missing this explicit innovation strategy. That is a serious failure at the top of organizations in my opinion. How can leaders expect innovation if they remain unclear of their role and function in facilitating and encouraging it?

Can this change?

A collaborative effort
Jeffrey Phillips of Ovo Innovation and myself have collaborated on a number of different innovation frameworks over the last twenty-four months or so.

These have been  to offer concepts or frameworks that we felt were missing or needed explaining. We have set about the offering up of possible solutions to reduce much of this ‘mystery’  that seems to still surround innovation.

As we shared and exchanged views, we have mutually recognized our personal frustrations on this continued leadership gap towards innovation.

This has been triggered even more by this Capgemini report and so we decided on a way forward as our ‘tipping point’ to set about studying this and seeing if we could find a solution to this innovation leadership issue.

Or at the very least, advance this recognition, beyond debates from this constant recognition of a problem, into offering an emerging framing on the ways to begin to resolve this.

A soft launch will happen offering our integrated innovation ‘framing’ as a solution.

We think we have now arrived at a further tipping point and will ‘soft’ launch the integrated innovation framework this coming weekend, starting Sunday 9^th September 2012.

We will build within a series of seven articles, one per day over a week, which we believe make up the component parts.

We will attempt to explain what we see as an integrated executive innovation framework that will be delivered through a work mat methodology approach. These articles will be published initially through www.innovationexcellence.com to gain an audience of innovators and then will be taken out further by our two respective organizations in further field work, validation and consultation.

I recently wrote a series of articles in August and one is perhaps worth reading again, this is “From a buzzword to the imperative.” In this I discuss this need for a framework and then go on and explore different components within a series of subsequent articles, that I felt needed leadership attention.

The present argument needs moving on and resolving

There is no argument surely that we need to break into this leadership gap around innovation? We need to offer suggestions towards their role, to address this lack of engagement or awareness?

We need to provide an organizing framework that achieves alignment into the organizations goals and provides the structure across innovation that can ‘cascade’ down and across an organization.

The end aim is that so all those involved within the organization, or closely associated with it, can relate too and ‘gather’ around an overarching framework, articulated and constructed from the top, that guides innovation.

We want to narrow this leadership gap and organization understanding so as to achieve a specific connection between leaders and their role in how they can facilitate and bridge this clear divide and present seen ‘impediment’ for innovation.

The leaders of organizations are no different from all the employees working within the company, they are all looking to secure a sustaining future and participate in a vibrant one that primarily comes from the innovation engine needed for all businesses and economic growth.

The contribution of the leaders within organizations falls mainly on defining their role, laying out its parts in a coherent way for all to relate too.

We believe this framework approach can be one of the primary organizing ways for that engagement and identification so much needed.

Tune in please and we certainly hope you can relate to what we are offering

We believe this integrated framework will require some real leadership engagement but we believe the outcome can offer four significant benefits:

1. The framework can create cohesion and consistency of innovation purpose that will reduce many existing barriers and uncertainties around innovation
2. As the leadership does become engaged this will demonstrate a significant commitment and promise that will certainly increases the visibility of innovation, lowers risks, encourages more involvement and generation of better ideas.
3. The framework itself will generate work flows that connect, become more dynamic to explore and promote the innovation skills, capabilities and competencies needed. They become more cohesive, coordinated and focused
4. As the framework connects, in its understanding and as its impact grows, we certainly believe confidence builds. Both formal and informal areas are addressed in parallel, growing all-round identification and alignment.

A challenging road to travel

To get to this tantalizing promise needs a lot of recognition, engagement, investment and commitment. You don’t suddenly arrive at enacting such a change without some ‘hard yards’ to cover and tough issues to resolve.

We are only at the starting point by offering this integrated innovation framework. We have confidence it will help, what we need is the right audience to listen and simply say “I get it.”

For the leaders, to hopefully see its organizing value and fit and their critical role to play in supporting innovation through this organizing and integrated framework so the organization initiates and delivers what is expected, better than today.

Do we see bumps on the way, of course, do we feel they can be navigated, again of course; otherwise you don’t start the journey. We are equipping ourselves for some demanding challenges.

We continue to invest in this framework as we see it does offer real potential

We feel this period of research, investment and consistently exchanging between us both has certainly increased in intensity over the last six months.

We have built a structure; a methodology and a guiding set of approaches that help facilitate and provide the CEO and his leadership team with a way to radically reduce that innovation leadership gap.

We can offer a clear ‘way forward’ for engagement and alignment that can help, perhaps radically, the organization to establish innovation firmly into the minds of the boardroom and their vital role to play within this real need for all to engage in.

We seek to bridge the innovation leadership gap
All I can do at this stage is ask you to please explore this series of articles, don’t rush to judge and dismiss, take the more explore and reflect, approach. We simply want you to have a similar identification and equally ‘I get it, maybe we need it’ at this stage.

We hopefully begin to bridge the innovation leadership gap and the role they need to play and we feel we offer a way to address the lack of innovation leadership that is clearly ‘out there missing’ in nearly all organizations.

In organizations this needs internal discussions to recognize this ‘gap’ and then gain the leaderships attention to how this can be addressed. The proposed integrated innovation framework might be the place to start and our arguments might be the catalyst.

We launch our “emerging thoughts” in this series of articles on the different innovation domains needed to be explored at the leadership level, this coming weekend 9^th September 2012, and each day, during that week.

We outline these through the frameworks different domains themselves. Do take a look and I hope you agree, we offer a way forward and are wanting to engage and deploy this framework to the leadership of innovation.

The post Leaders need to engage and drive innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.