building capabilites and capacity for innovation - Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence

Are you coming to the Innovation Virtual Summit?

@paul4innovating — Wed, 15 Nov 2017 13:11:22 +0000

So there is an innovation virtual summit about to happen between 28th November 2017 and 8th December 2017. Each day you can watch for free the different video sessions, with new video sessions released on a daily basis. The final schedule will be sent by email after your registration.

For some weeks this has been in preparation and as I am lucky enough to be one of the curators and hosts, I had the chance to chat with SIX terrific and highly knowledgeable people around different subject that are dear to all our hearts, overcoming barriers and resolving many tough issues surrounding innovation.

So What Is Your #1 Question or Challenge in the next 6 to 18 months?

There is a very good chance there is an answer or a trigger into getting you closer to resolving your questions and challenges by tuning into and listening to some 28+ Innovation Experts Sharing Their Strategies and Tactics That Work.

The organizers crowdsourced the questions from their global community of 29,000+ corporate innovators, and they never imagined they would get such a huge response. The point is “Whatever challenge you’re trying to tackle right now, someone else already has figured it out. So by asking these 28 innovation experts to answer them, we clustered the questions into broader themes and then explored these in exchanges that had different depth and breadth to them that can give real value to many of the ‘burning’ questions we, as innovators, have to face.

It’s free, and you can attend on any device, from anywhere you have an internet connection. The interview talks will be available online to watch at your own convenience – there’s no strict schedule to follow.

Virtual Summits have a great future to support

I think virtual summits are becoming a real differentiator and one of the main reasons to work on this. This is organized by the team from www.intrapreneurship.com under their innov8rs brand.So why should virtual be for you? Some benefits suggested by the organizers.

There is no travel and you can watch anywhere with an internet connection. In the office, during your commute, on your couch. There’s no flight or hotel room to book, saving you thousands of euros, travel time, and time away from the office and your family. No need to get a budget from your boss, how does that sound? For me utterly worth the time and effort to learn at my own pace, where I choose, when I choose.

The flexible schedule simply works for you, in your time and need. The interview talks will be available online to watch at your own convenience – there’s no strict schedule to follow and everything will be available until December 15th, and if you want to purchase these longer you’ll get access to all the interviews and bonus material forever. Follow this link to sign up.

It is a really unique set of experts. Virtual events are becoming more important for us all, to get better understandings across at times that are more convenient. They can be increasingly tailored to get so much closer to your specific needs. In this case crowdsourcing, clustering and expert exchanges give a closer experience to addressing your challenges in a broader context. I think this beats so many of those bland ‘one-Corporate view only’ set of experiences that really so very often provide little ‘take home’ value apart from shades of jealousy or “we wish”. These speakers at this conference are very committed to driving innovation, it is their passion, work and diversity of experiences that get drawn out, and I, in my discussions, do certainly got the distinct impression are genuinely committed to helping the broader innovation community, meaning you, to succeed.

Let me highlight the SIX experts I worked with

I had the delight of working on SIX key topics with a terrific group of knowledgeable people. I gained from the exchanges, it generated such terrific insights, ideas, and triggers to lift up my understanding and help me ‘fill in’ my questions and set me some of my own challenges for next year. They really did discuss different topics that are often top of mind for all innovators, intrapreneurs, and teams tackling innovation. The value also becomes one of those not working in the innovation space but have direct responsibility or simply curiosity on different parts of the innovation story will gain immeasurably from registering and attending this virtual summit.

The group I shared thoughts and heard their ideas and experiences on overcoming problems, dealing with challenges or simply drawing down from their experiences were stimulating sessions. I’d encourage you to catch all of these, as well as many, many other great exchanges.

Meet the curators and hosts

The curators and hosts for this virtual summit had such a diversity of experience and geographical coverage. I am wanting to tune in to many of their sessions to learn from their experiences and exchanges with the experts. This included:

So come on, join me, it’s online and free. Hopefully, I’ll see you there. Here is my link

The Innovator’s Handbook 2018 – Virtual Summit gives you cross-industry best practices, and ready-to-use and easy-to-implement advice from in-the-trenches experts…and you can attend on any device, from anywhere you have an internet connection and then you can sign up for sharing with your team and colleagues in the months ahead for a small one-off fee to give you access to all the content forever.

There is an upgrade option before or once you get the ‘feel’ of the Virtual Summit

This upgrade is a no-obligation option when you sign up for the free virtual summit.

What does this upgrade offer? If you do upgrade you have anytime access to all 88+ videos forever. This comes with your own playbook called the Innov8rs Handbook 2018. It is a professionally written and designed playbook, organized by topic area and question, containing the key points, strategies and practices from each expert session.

If you upgrade, you also get 25% discount for any event of your choice in 2018 from the organizers of some great conferences. Not just for 1 ticket, but for 5 tickets. Yup, that means you can bring your team.

The free Summit pass comes with one week of access to an exclusive Innov8rs online community. If you chose to turn this into your upgrade, you’ll get full community access for one month for direct access to best practices; weekly live expert sessions; and on-demand advice and support from a community of people who, just like you, are leading innovation, transformation, and growth initiatives in their organizations.

Finally, a choice for you on upgrades, now or later. If you decide to upgrade irrespective of waiting for the virtual conference it is only €88. The price goes up to €188 when the summit starts on November 28. Up to you, no obligation but it might make real sense of what you will be getting.

Use this link now

Don’t miss the first-ever crowdsourced and virtual Innovation Summit. It holds real promise and plenty of valuable content and learning. It is 100% co-created by corporate innovators, for corporate innovators.

Come join me and many others, it is well worth your time and attendance.

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Building upon the four essential pillars for innovation

@paul4innovating — Mon, 06 Nov 2017 12:19:56 +0000

It is always welcome to read a thoughtful article that reminds me, no, it actually inspires me, by reinforcing my own belief that innovation is progressing, even if this is sometimes frustratingly slow. The innovation architecture is progressively being recognized and put into place, it’s forming the building blocks of the innovation platform we need to build upon, ones for more radical innovation outcomes.

So the article “Want to Win at Business Model Innovation? Put these Four Pillars in Place” was written by Rick Waldron, ex Nike, and Intel.

He grabbed my attention with this comment early on in the article:

“ Little attention has been paid to the architecture required to stand up a sustainable, impactful new business innovation capability. Those of us battling it out in the trenches are left to learn the hard way”

I so very much relate to this central recognition that most organizations lack a solid, well thought through innovation architecture, it is one of the real reasons innovation is constantly under-delivering.

Rick points out:“Corporate innovation efforts by and large continue to fall far short of moving the needle in any significant, sustained way or of delivering on the promise of future-proofing companies against ever-increasing disruptive forces.

While a growing number of companies have begun to find some success in implementing design-centered thinking, lean innovation techniques, jobs-to-be-done analysis, and empowering employees to solve customer and internal process problems, much of the focus has been on supporting current business models – i.e., on incremental rather than game-changing innovation. But this work is merely the table stakes for staying in the current game”

The view offered in this article suggests four pillars to be put into place: 1) A Committed and Engaged Leadership, 2) A Comprehensive Innovation Strategy, 3) A Sustained Mindset Shift and 4) A Comprehensive Tool Kit.

Rick’s article just gave me the chance to go back and review my thoughts and relate his excellent suggestions and thinking into some of the work I have written about in this area. So I wanted to link them up a little more in my mind on some diverse and previous thoughts that I have written about and hopefully link them far more into yours and this article of Rick’s.

Reflecting and Validating

I’m not sure how many countless articles I have written over each of these pillars, it seems far too many and also I have attempted to offer some different solutions in frameworks and models to underpin these thoughts.

I was exchanging with Rick since this article and offered up some of my opening thoughts back to him, ideally with the intent to have an ongoing conversation that builds even further on his observations and suggestions. So then I thought, well let me put these into a post that links these a little more. We seem to hold similar views on the critical places to focus for building greater innovation capability and reflect on many of the same underlying problems that inhibit innovation. I value Rick’s different experience perspective, it freshens up my thinking.

Some of my links and references are here if you find the time and opportunity to delve a little deeper into my views.

So taking Rick’s four pillars as the shape of this post.

Achieving a Committed & Engaged Leadership

I have suggested an Executive Innovation Work Mat as a frame to organize around. It is a concept to help in the Architecture design, especially as part of its framing solution is attempting a cascading model both up and down organizations

http://box2077.temp.domains/~paulfoui/2012/09/16/the-overarching-proposition-for-the-executive-innovation-work-mat/

I did like his observation that “where that leadership commitment and acumen does not exist, the task at hand is to develop it”

For me, this is building a compelling business case for fully integrating innovation into the core of the business.

http://box2077.temp.domains/~paulfoui/2016/09/01/making-a-compelling-business-case-for-an-integrated-innovation-framework/

Establishing a Comprehensive Innovation Strategy

The linkage between strategy and innovation is one of being absolutely essential. A couple of my thoughts that underpin this suggested pillar link into his views

Rick made this telling remark “Without an innovation strategy, innovation improvement efforts can become a grab bag of much-touted best practices: dividing R&D into decentralized autonomous teams, spawning internal entrepreneurial ventures, setting up corporate venture-capital arms, pursuing external alliances, embracing open innovation and crowdsourcing, collaborating with customers, and implementing rapid prototyping”

http://box2077.temp.domains/~paulfoui/2017/06/27/the-essential-connection-between-strategy-and-innovation/

Rick made this absolutely sound observation: “The corporate strategy team should have the access and skills required to support senior leadership in identifying and articulating priorities, resourcing commitments, boundaries, strategic hunting zones, and definitions of success. The innovation team, in turn, can serve as an “applied strategy” tool for the strategy team, helping them refine and build confidence in the strategy through rapid, low-cost, in-market experiments around new potential business platforms, customer solutions, and operating models. That enables both teams to do what they do best and create a symbiotic relationship”

http://box2077.temp.domains/~paulfoui/2015/02/08/one-really-big-issue-is-aligning-strategy-and-innovation-right/

Sustained Mindset Shift

Rick offered this great insight: “The more transformational the innovation strategy, the further a company will be stepping into uncertain, unpredictable territory. You are revealing and creating the future, rather than planning for it. This requires an important leadership mindset shift from operator/manager to investor/entrepreneur”

In thinking more out in the future through the focus on the 3 Horizons framework for different necessary ‘voices’ to gather around innovation. I like Rick’s emphasis on mindset shifts whereas I had taken more the voices within a Boardroom or any discussion around innovation.

http://box2077.temp.domains/~paulfoui/2015/04/04/drawing-out-the-different-voices-within-the-three-horizon-methodology-for-innovation/

These three voices that must all be engaged in a conversation should have the voice of today, the incumbent, the manager(s) responsible for delivering today’s result. Then you have the second voice, the voice of the entrepreneur, the one eager to experiment, try out new things, wanting to push further. Lastly, we have the third voice, the voice of the aspirant, who sees a different future. Today, more than ever we have this real need to look towards the future

I did like his much stronger view of “engineering a mindset shift” and his offering up a suggested way to institutionalize it.

Comprehensive Tool Kit

We so often see that organizations never seem able to bring together and openly share a full set of capabilities to build the innovation capacity to allow innovators to do a more comprehensive job of innovating.

Rick asks the question here of “where the business model innovation at hand is best served by a build, buy, partner or invest approach. It’s also important to realize that the answer to that might change over time, as the work moves from early-stage exploration to establishing a market beachhead, to grow market share, to achieving scale. This, in turn, will guide the team in identifying (and even creating) the innovation and corporate development tools that are best for the task at hand”… I like this line of questioning in building out a growing understanding of what is needed to go and find out about and also to then build.

I have been attempting to build up a growing set of explanations to different innovation tools

http://box2077.temp.domains/~paulfoui/2017/08/19/exploring-frameworks-and-methods-you-need-to-know-as-an-innovator/

Then reflecting on a range of top or most popular tools related to innovation

http://box2077.temp.domains/~paulfoui/2016/01/14/sorting-through-our-innovation-management-tools/

The need for an effective innovation architecture

It was the lack of attention to the innovation architecture that draws me into Rick’s article. I have attempted to explore this in different ways, he helped me pull this together with a little more in my thinking and reinforce where I need to focus a part of my efforts.

I worked some time back was on the different approaches to innovation and within this was the Innovation Business Architecture in an outlined model to explore. http://cirf.pbworks.com/w/page/38930046/Innovation%20Business%20Architecture

The Business model canvas has been disappointing as it has not been evolving.

In recent years the BMC has not evolved and reflected enough in the massive changes undergoing, reflecting the move from Business model products into Business Model platforms and the greater need for ecosystems and collaborations. These multi- interrelated business models are coming together to build more compelling solutions. The BMC has focused on supporting and reinforcing single entity product innovation and is not adapting the changes taking place in considering different business model options.

I have have spent a lot of time on the BMI in past years and found the canvas a great leap forward in our framing and articulating the business models but have become a little disillusioned in recent years, as it seemed to me the main inventors and proponents of the BMC have not evolved it, as technology and platforms have taken a stronger hold on business solutions. There has been a consistent “push” on the customer side, yet there seemed to have been less emphasis, or even ignored or understated, on the back-end, the Business Model Architecture. Perhaps this area has been conceeded for development to others? I wonder if the BMC become stuck in this one ‘great’ idea for a single company dealing in their product offering?

Business model assessment does need to reflect the changes taking place, based around platforms and ecosystems of businesses and customers combining, a radically different Architecture, to find and offer more complex and comprehensive solutions, built through technology and greater collaborations and exchanges. We need greater understanding of the new tools the digital age offers to challenge our existing business models.

I felt the back-end very underdeveloped in guidance as I wrote here

http://box2077.temp.domains/~paulfoui/2013/06/26/the-understated-back-end-of-the-business-model-canvas/

This started my questioning of the Business model, back in 2013. I looked harder at the Value part of the Business model, for example in a few posts around about then

http://box2077.temp.domains/~paulfoui/2013/07/05/the-age-of-large-business-model-reinvention/

http://box2077.temp.domains/~paulfoui/2014/03/09/knowing-the-value-within-your-business-model-is-vital/

This questioning of present approaches to Business model innovation has brought me back to the very point Rick has raised.

“ Little attention has been paid to the architecture required to stand up a sustainable, impactful new business innovation capability”

I think we are entering a New Innovation Era

Structuring the design of the innovation architecture is changing, fairly radically, in my view. It still will be based on the four pillars suggested in Rick’s article: 1) Committed and Engaged Leadership, 2) Comprehensive Innovation Strategy, 3) Sustained Mindset Shift and 4) Comprehensive Tool Kit that will be built out on a far more dynamic foundation, with technology and network effects as critical within any future design, not single entity and product design.

So I think it will be fundamentally different in this architecture that underpins these four pillars. In my opinion, it needs to be based on the thinking around the shift from products to platform solutions, from transactions to building far more value-adding ongoing relationships, from a supplier of product services into highly valued network partnerships, exploring innovation across all options. Instead of delivering on discrete elements; this requires managing the whole ecosystem of the innovation design differently, through technology where platforms dominate, and transformation becomes an ongoing process to evolve the business model, so as to seek out constantly changing market opportunities, in agile, adaptive and fluid ways, for successful innovation outcomes, that meet those real customer needs. This will increasingly be within ecosystems of collaborators.

I’ve written about this under the tag “New Innovation Era” on this site fairly extensively in the past year, the latest being this:

http://box2077.temp.domains/~paulfoui/2017/09/15/jumping-to-a-fresh-cycle-of-innovation-design/

I think within this article of Rick’s he nicely sums up our overarching need.

“It’s an understatement to say that writing a transformative next chapter for an established enterprise is hard. To increase the odds of success, one must begin with an effective innovation architecture consisting of committed, engaged leadership; a thorough and clear innovation strategy; a sustainable investor/entrepreneurial mindset; and a broad suite of innovation and corporate development tools”

I agree with his observation and many practical thoughts and suggestions. We are in urgent need to build a clear innovation architecture as we do need this new business innovation capability. We are entering a different innovation era and if we don’t pay specific attention to the architecture of innovation we will not have a bright future, we will increasingly fall behind those that do get the need for serious investment in building innovation capability and capacity.

A link to Rick’s article again is here. I hope it inspires you as much as it did me, in our need to keep building innovation capabilities.

*Some amendments were made on 7th November,2017

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We are in need of a common language for innovation

@paul4innovating — Thu, 22 Jun 2017 12:57:20 +0000

German Late Medieval (c. the 1370s) depiction of the construction of the tower.

Any innovation common language needs working upon. It firstly needs recognition it is in our best interests to find a common point. It needs to be relevant to each of us, it must be current, appropriate, accurate and highly visible throughout the entire organization. It also needs to be allowed to grow and flourish, to evolve and become the lingua franca of all our innovation work. It needs building and constructing in conscious ways and design.

Let’s step back just for one minute, these ‘sentiments’ are fine, yet we actually do, seriously lack a common language for innovation and we should find the ways and the means to change this. It holds innovation back significantly. It can’t continue in a world of greater networking and collaboration.

Languages unites us or keeps dividing us

Language can have the power to unite us or potentially divide us. Developing a language to unite us in our innovation efforts goes some way to reduce disagreements and egos, to qualify individual interpretation or bias, often a key inhibitor that can block a team’s success. It lays in a common foundation. It builds confidence and understanding.

Once we have a common language, we can set about building and creating a more robust innovation management system. One that builds on this framework so it can relate to the relevant context, conditions, and environment for innovation, to offer within this building block, the common identity.

These identifiers can build into better understanding how to structure governance, process, and functional structures, to build a culture that is responsive as ‘they’ can identify a need for a common cause of understanding. It is in this central innovation language that becomes our clear unifying context, the enabler, and sense of personal identity with the purpose of what we are wishing to achieve.

In any common language, we need to master the understanding, the nuances and how it all fits together. We need to exploit it and extract what it can offer to enhance all the work we do in innovation. We need to appreciate always its terms, its definitions (and limitations) and the related performance values that can help to improve our performance and in our achievements of working increasingly with others. A common understanding of our meaning to ‘innovate’ becomes an imperative.

Today we all having a different meaning and interpretations within our innovation understanding.

Each organization has specifics in meaning that can often end up in results that break down and so deliver results totally different from their original intent. As we grow out our collaborations into ecosystems the need for a common language becomes even more vital. For example:

Often misunderstanding occurs, even though we initially thought we had communicated well but those that receive this often apply different interpretations that confirm their personal views,
There is always this risk that others often apply subtle nuances and variations built on their experiences or understanding on how ‘something works’, and it is within these different readings we can suffer costly errors, extensive delays and wrong end results in the final product or service delivery.
We suffer significant inefficiencies because we don’t pay enough attention to ensuring the correct meaning is well understood, we simply believe our way of thinking is the only way it is conveyed to be understood, and as we all know, this is often far from the reality. Context and Communications are kings in my opinion.
We need to seek explicit language and context to allow innovation to do its final job, of delivering a valuable new contribution that builds on the existing and meets new market and customers’ needs or the jobs-to-be-done.

Innovation becomes highly constrained if we fail to find that common language, that common purpose, the understanding of the right context and ended up providing something that was not as good as it could have been, or we simply veered completely off track, on the original insight. It somehow got lost in translation, in applying individual meaning. Translation is one of those keys that can unlock so much within innovation but often it just simply goes the other way and gets “lost in translation”

To apply a common language, we need to invest in its practice

The more we practice and move towards a common understanding of innovation, we are moving towards clarifying and reconciling, as best we can, within the constraints of what common language or context offers. We give innovation a greater chance to succeed. A common language enables greater transparency, clarity in accountability through its definitions; we achieve greater collaborative dialogues and meet more concurrence than without this move towards a common understanding.

So much of innovation is piecing together many fragmented pieces, strands of knowledge that can be unstructured can be very ambiguous, yet requires sound judgment. Innovation builds on shared experience and the quality of its interaction points. The more we learn to collaborate, the more we begin to share experiences, the more we achieve a growing common language. We need to bring together increasingly the parts that growing specialization, our limited grasp of all the complexities that can influence a decision. We need to constantly reconcile incoming information with our own language of understanding, so we need to strive towards improving the common parts surely?

I think as we build a common language we need a certain learning rhythm.

This is where absorptive capacity can come in, as it offers a structured way of building our knowledge understanding and fits within this. Absorptive capacity has the different steps of acquiring, assimilating, transforming and exploiting but these need a clear sequence, structure, and commonality to their approach, to gain the lasting benefit.

A common language of innovation working to a common end cause also allows for a knowledge learning repository to be built up, so all can potentially prosper as their starting point to innovate, as they learn from past experiences and insights. Innovation is something we all can do, not just a selected few but it is sharing our knowledge can encourage others to find the time and then invest in all of what it can mean to them; liberating them to explore alternatives and exploit their experiences by applying something ‘gained’ as something

Innovation is something we all can do, not just a selected few but it is sharing our knowledge can encourage others to find the time and then invest in all of what it can mean to them; liberating them to explore alternatives and exploit their experiences by applying something ‘gained’ as something enhancing.

A bedrock for building and sustaining innovation is a common intent, language, and context

Forming a common language should be the bedrock for how we set about innovation. It cannot be silo driven or developed to fit one individual team, unless you want stilted results with incremental innovation being most likely as the best you can achieve most of the time, within this ‘constraint’, as we increasingly need to reach out and learn to collaborate

How we go about our communications, what and who you can connect with and your level of innovation engagement, do matter significantly. It is the ability to find the common identity, a real unifying sense of purpose that sends positive signals to all involved and those interested parties, often external to your ‘inner’ innovation process, to engage fully.

A common language can change much within innovation. Can we find the investment time to build this into the work we need to do? We should. It is in all of our future collaborating interests.

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Fusion, Flow and Fluidity are needed in our Management Practices

@paul4innovating — Mon, 19 Jun 2017 11:06:40 +0000

We are caught in a real tug of war within much of what we do in business today; in our responses and reactions to many of the dramatic business conditions we are facing, many deteriorating or being challenged by greater global competition.

We are facing a very uncertain future if we base our actions on past practices. We need a new management model, one where we are pushing to seek increasing new knowledge.

We actually are in urgent need of a new management operating model.

A new management model where we are pushing to seek increasing ‘fusion’ but still want degree’s of separation, we are seeking out ‘flows’ through new knowledge to break down barriers that restrict new insights so as to turn these into new value creation, and we are encouraged to seek out and establish a higher ‘fluidity’ in what we do and reduce the rigidity we presently have in place in our current organizations.

There are growing concerns centered around how we need to adapt our management practices to manage in a digital world, we are grappling with the consequences and we need to find new solutions and approaches. We face issues made up of increasing information overload, coming at us at increasing speed and failing in our abilities to fully interpret this. We lack the agility and flexibility to respond to what this all means in both its implications and potential, for sensing and seizing new value creation from understanding this.

We need a new management practice to deal with our digital world. One real need is for increasing knowledge and then being equipped in interpreting this in our learning, daily routines and activities is becoming paramount to break out of a declining performance cycle.

Applying the three horizon lens to develop new management practices

If you apply the three horizon lens we need to construct management and its performance approaches differently you begin to see the pathway for change.

Applying the three horizon lens to new management practices

The idea grew from picking up on Deloitte’s Shift Index that has come out ever year since its first release in 2009 I came across a way for me to frame this.

Our horizon one (extending business as usual) needs a deeper, yet strategic restructuring of firm economics to generate the maximum possible value from existing resources

For horizon three (the future need) we need to develop new management practices to be effectively catalyzing and participating in different knowledge flows, fusing what is gained into new value creation, reducing friction and barriers, constantly refreshing and extracting from the relevant knowledge flows that provide scalable learning pathways.

Our horizon two (transition from old to new) we need significant innovation, learning and experimentation to drive scalable participation in knowledge exploration and exploitation, a duality of fluidity and stability.

See here and here for a fuller explanation of the different approaches needed in three horizon approaches, if you are not familar with this framework approach, they will help.

Let me build this out in why we need to change the way we gain knowledge and translate this.

My three points of reference in researching and framing this post are, firstly, Deloitte’s ongoing work on the Shift Index, providing a longer-term set of indicators to how we can change performance through the flows of knowledge, capital, and talent (their second wave). This is coupled with my own studies and commentary on fluidity and thirdly, the “stock and flow” of knowledge and how we can harness it for our needed sustainability and this new value creation.

The future of managing will be through ecosystems and platforms

I am constantly drawn to ecosystems and platforms as the connecting mechanism that can drive each of the stages of the three horizon view taken here. It is going to be through greater collaboration, sharing and exchanging we can learn a new form of ’emerging’ management practice

In our past management practices, we have operated and exploited the linear world for ever-increasing efficiencies and effectiveness. This relied on stability, predictability and a willing end-user, ready to accept ‘our’ offer of product or service. All three of these conditions are increasingly absent from our world today and will increasingly be challenged in the future. Our increasing connectivity, brought about by our digital world is giving us increasing volume, richness at increasing speed. We are in a hyper-connected world, potentially global for all of us and increasingly we will operate in interdependent ecosystems that allow us to collaborate and share, driving up awareness and performance.

Classic models of management get broken down in any ecosystem approach, that is why it has such an exciting potential. You have to be open, prepared far more to share, to build trust and seek out increasing relationships and diversity of knowledge and much of that comes from external sources of new knowledge. Collaborating in collective ways helps break down complexity. To be ready to respond we must be ready to seek out unexpected outcomes, to be increasingly exposed to new opinions, experiences and learn from all those adjacencies and external connections help to add and define new potential within our domain of expertise. What will be rewarded in this connecting world is agility to respond, the ability to absorb and learn quickly, and the nimbleness to translate and adapt new learning into insights and eventual outcomes, that build out our businesses, keeping them healthy, growing and sustainable.

Our world is shifting from scalable efficiency to scalable learning

In the work of John Hagel and John Seely Brown and their associates at Deloitte University Press, this scalable change from efficiency to learning is a central tenet of their work. Achieving scale is critical for all in business, be it the entrepreneur or start-up or the large institutions wanting to span the world. If you wanted to scale it had to be “efficient and effective” in our past approaches. Yet as the two John’s point out that is great in the stable, more predictable world or market conditions of the past but not when everything is evolving rapidly or changing before our eyes. The efficiency mantra often allows for applying the “lowest common denominator of need” and reduces the impact of ‘true’ innovation.

But we are now in a world that sees exponential change caused by digital technologies, this is making everything we do as uncertain. We arte experiencing consumers increasingly demanding personalized service and offerings, then the past standardizing approach is significantly under threat. We are seeing increasing friction, deteriorating trust and growing gaps in expectancy between “what we want and expect with what we receive” and institutions need to respond to these pressures. It cannot be the approach “business as usual” it needs a new recognition as outlined in my horizon one frame above.

We are recognizing “existing knowledge is depreciating at an accelerating rate”. To create new knowledge we have to step out of our silo of the one institution into a collaborative world, connecting with others where the physical, virtual and management of systems help accelerate learning. Increasingly these learnings will come through ecosystems and platforms where you can meet and exchange in systematic and holistic ways, building growing trusted relationships, sharing and exploring ‘collective’ knowledge to solve common problems.

You move from the need of conformity to be efficient, seeking out where you fit within a ‘given’ system you look for increasing the ‘flow’ of learning by encouraging increasing fluidity and being highly adaptive. Your role is not to fit as such, it becomes how you can separate, identify and deliver more value, to translate and learn faster, to rapidly connect understanding, ideas and potential outcomes for new value.

Balancing fluidity and stability

The world we live in is relentless, it is demanding and constantly changing. We begin to believe it is in a “continuously unstable state” yet it is this ongoing receiving of contradictions we can build a different, more fluid state that is adaptive, responsive and encourages different thinking to break through our bewilderment.

We need to build far more for countervailing functions and opinions, have greater understandings of pattern recognition and maintenance and be highly adaptive in our outcomes. We must start by establishing a different boundary building understanding (governance, risk-taking, ability to recognize managing exceptions are becoming the rule in individual consumer worlds), have a growing identity formation set of mechanisms and responses (in customer touch points, response alternatives, conflict skills to resolve issues early) and develop the problem-solving architecture to be constantly evolving (shared, reinforcing and breaking down present orthodoxies).

Ambidexterity and countervailing processes need developing and embedding. Achieving a constant duality to manage in our three horizons. It is the horizon two exploration and exploitation that allows this change in managing transit from the old (h1) to the new (h3). We need to re-enforce and extend (h2-), we need to ‘undo’, explore and redesign (h2+).

To become fluid we need to absorb and respond at faster rate and that comes from the increasing flow of new knowledge. We need to be highly adaptive to a constant, multi-faceted world of connections, systems and knowing where the different pieces need to be found, so we can then ‘pieced’ together into the ‘new whole’ you are needing to design, at individual or institutional design level.

To get to a point of being fluid we need to hone our navigation skills, we need to have more assignment driven work, not stuck in repeating work that can be automated far more effectively in today’s digital world.

We need to be more agile, iterative, to be encouraged to be experimenting and exploring. We need to believe and given trust to execute and drive our results into more value-add. We need to seek out empowerment, participate in collaborative endeavors, and most importantly grasp the makeup of value creation. To get to this point we need to build one of those boundary spanning guidelines of a sound conflict resolution pathway for ourselves, our customers and our institutions and these will be ‘living constantly evolving pathways‘ that feed on new learning.

To get to this ‘fluid state‘ we all must strive for authenticity, trust, and recognition. This only will come from a real willingness to seek out diversity in opinion, knowledge and experience, to be highly visible and understanding what that means in risk and reward, looking to constantly enter and exit projects where we can truly contribute to driving up our own confidence and belief, our personal satisfaction and contributing worth.

If we can design a framework that transforms us into being highly fluid and adaptive, we can move through horizon two and its conflicting challenges. We are seeking to balance stability with an ongoing need for dynamism and responsiveness, at agile and fast ‘reaction’ times from our ‘incoming learning’ and ‘outgoing value-added‘ outcome

Seeking out the relevant flows within new knowledge for increasing scalable learning, our new institutional state.

The stock of our existing knowledge is rapidly diminishing, we need to seek out the flow of new knowledge. Our fixed and enduring know-how and sets of experience are being diminished in their value inside organizations. What was once accumulated as ‘stock’ inside the organization was how organizations exploited this for profit. Yet this is under attack from multiple sides.

We are seeing a compression of time in life-cycles, we are not in stable markets but increasingly volatile. New generation replacements, driven along by digital solution power, are pushing innovation through the pipeline faster than before. We are failing to keep up with the knowledge you need. It simply can’t reside in one company, small teams or simply with one person, it requires a network of partners collaborating and contributing their expertise into exploring and exploiting new solutions, tapping into this inter-firm knowledge flow and experience with innovative solutions that are more aligned to customer needs, solving challenges and growing complexity.

The search for knowledge means a higher emphasis on tacit understanding (this link explains tacit knowledge)This understanding comes from relationships and exchanges, from personal stories, experiences, and personal connection. Our ability to tap into this tacit knowledge comes increasingly from these ecosystems and platforms set up to exchange, collaborate, and build a network of common understanding. A common understanding of a problem or challenge, through the diversity and power of the community that works together to find solutions and resolve the multiple issues.

I do think Deloitte’s view that we need to move to scalable learning is essential to achieve. This needs completely new practices to be effectively catalyzing and participating in different knowledge flows, fusing what is gained into new value creation, reducing friction and barriers, constantly refreshing and extracting from the relevant knowledge flows.

Knowledge intensity can risk fragmentation and inequality, it can lead to concentration of market power. It is finding more universal practices can level the playing field. Digital is part of this leveling. We equally have to learn how to create, disseminate and use knowledge differently.

Here I am a particular fan of absorptive capacity that pursues potential knowledge and extracts out its realized value through transformation and exploitation.

The more ‘open’ Absorptive Capacity Process

As more information comes towards us at increasing volume, we need to find ways to adapt and interpret this. There is a greater set of ‘forces of variation’ for innovation solution selection, all requiring this increased knowledge understanding. To codify and relate to this we need a structure to manage this knowledge flow, hence my belief in us needing to understand absorptive capacity.

In a future post, I will look more at knowledge and all its important components. We totally understate the value and importance of knowledge. It is managing the different types of knowledge that offer us the solutions in our digital age. We need to design a scalable learning approach (horizon 3 outcome) and recognizing all of what ‘makes-up’ knowledge is important to build into this h3 solution.

In summary

We need to harness the capacity of learning through the competencies for new knowledge acquiring. We need to replenish the internal diminishing stocks of knowledge with a constant flow of new knowledge. This comes from outside, it comes through networks, relationships and collaborations increasingly built on ecosystem and platforms.

It is our increasing ability to participate in this growing formation of managing knowledge flows, harnessed through digital solutions, as they will move us to value creation. Ones that are increasingly collaborative, between partners but also with customers, all increasingly contributing their knowledge, insights, and needs to finding joint solutions and resolving challenges.

To achieve better outcomes and to drive sustained growth we need different management practices. We require scalable participation (ecosystems) to relate too and generate new knowledge flows. We need to be increasingly responsive, adaptive and fluid in any design of structures and solutions.

Performance requires us to quickly learn and translate, that cannot come from the pursuit of efficiency, it comes from learning to be highly adaptive and responsive, to have a high level of fluidity to fuse all the flows of knowledge into new potential value creation.

We do need this new management model to adapt to the digital world and all the uncertainty of our prevailing conditions of more open competitive and challenging markets, more demanding customers and the constant waves of information and ‘forces of change’ raining down on us. We need a new way of working to counter this.

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Is innovation really important to you?

@paul4innovating — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 12:54:25 +0000

How can we establish Innovation as the vital link to a process of change and strategic direction options? One that lifts the debates of managing today’s business by linking it into the future and then turning this thinking into a series of plausible and coherent set of activities?

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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Building Differentiating Capabilities for Innovation

@paul4innovating — Thu, 09 Feb 2017 15:57:00 +0000

We so often get caught up in the building of our capabilities. In some ways, I keep attempting to “peel the innovation onion” in explaining the need to focus on building the capabilities in different ways but to be honest, it needs these various approaches to an ever-changing environment.

A different intensity of innovation onion perhaps? Why, well we have the business of today, the emerging business of tomorrow and the future business that will provide a radically different set of capability building needs?

The struggle to date is that innovation remains hard to manage well; we strive to systematize it and then attempt to replicate any success we then have, so as to achieve more, yet more often than not. we do not take into account all the variables that came together for that particular winning outcome. Often this does not work on a repetitive basis as the variables that make up innovation can be different for each innovation event or activity but we can learn under a growing ‘range of’ differentiating capabilities.

I would argue there is the real, urgent need is to make the innovation capabilities and capacities as distinctive and unique as the circumstances ‘we’ are facing today and in the future but also highly adaptive and flexible, so you can be ready to call upon each of the components when needed, in new combinations that deliver on the result.

We spend far too much time copying others and not deliberately setting about building our own ‘distinct’ capabilities and capacities to innovate, building the necessary building blocks through our own learning experiences. These are always shaped by the context and content of your innovation, the organization’s position, its resources, commitment and leadership appetite for innovation. Each of our choices takes up on our own evolutionary paths, we can never truly understand other ones because we never really “walk in someone else’s shoes” Copying only renders us the same, not a great ‘winning position in highly competitive market conditions, is it?

Can we find you a unique set of critical innovation capabilities?

I believe we can as I outlined here on discussing dynamic capabilities. Here I am exploring solutions along an evolutionary path, that search for the unique innovation dynamics that are needed so you will arrive at the distinct and adaptive ones to what the CEO and board want to achieve out their strategic goals from its innovation investments. You take a fairly structured approach. It is knowing the capabilities that matter most to their particular innovation strategy and the present organization’s innovation fitness to lay out the pathway to learning how to improve, focus and execute these distinct capabilities needed in a highly focused manner and move progressively towards them.

As I have explained recently I often break my explanations down on this building core competency into eight parts.

We have two levels to it. The first (or higher level) is the need for a 1) Unifying framework, 2) to gain alignment and this needs two essential aspects to be well-clarified. We need to establish 3) a working blueprint and a clear understanding of 4) the business focus orientation for innovation to reside in.

The outcomes of this top-tier framing then we can begin to construct the underlying level of 5) well-designed competencies and capabilities that need to be pursued so we need to move the organization or the innovation activities into ones that are seeking out this constant alignment, and this needs building 6) critical enablers and behaviours, a seeking out of 7) motivators and finally, 8) the dependencies we must have to map back so as to advance our core and build our innovation competencies upon.

The innovation accelerators model – I often keep coming back to this

I have been working on arguing 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’ve outlined this solution in a previous post. I think it is worth working through, it seems to move with the times of what we need to focus upon. Building an innovation framework that has real capabilities at its heart.

I have worked on a formula SCA = II + OC + EE + MLC + RNE for this.

Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA) comes from the combining effects of the following:

II Innovation Intensity– its degree of adoption, the investments made, the multiple levels of activities and the focus of the intensity given to building capabilities to innovate.
EE Entrepreneurial Energies– this os more on how you set about, promote and generate the internal environment as entrepreneurial to enable innovation in all its different forms to take hold and be seen as a learning environment people want to get involved with as they can readily identify with.
MLC Market Learning Competence– these give a clearer awareness on what and where to acquire from and then take the market lessons from. The key need is to orientate always towards, and generally get to the heart of, where innovation takes place- in the marketplace and with your customers, knowing their real needs and also figuring out their unmet ones also!
OC Organizational Learning– knowing the differences in the different ways of learning by linking the different intellectual capitals and combining the complementary assets needed to make them more dynamic.
RNE- Relationship & Networking Effects– the supporting and enhancing aspects of making greater connections, collaborations and exchanges so as to speed up the process of innovation, reduce or contain costs and enhance your understanding through these external relationships and getting closer to knowing where latent knowledge lies, to assist and share this internally for greater impact and result for all.

I would encourage you to explore it, work it around in your own situation, it can provide a powerful catalyst to get everyone working at the critical parts of the formula and it is easy to remember.

So my additional ‘peeled onion’ to add to the stock of capability building for innovation is here

We do have to adapt out capability building increasing towards the future. We need to continue to differentiate ourselves and I would offer seven ‘generic’ thoughts or broad theme clusters that you might want to build around, to build your capabilities that will make you far more ‘innovation fit’ for the future.

Linking to a clear sense of purpose. If we are aware of the direction we can ‘open up’ the discussions about our needs to achieve this sense of purpose. A clarity of what ‘we’ have along with the gaps we need to bridge to get to this future purpose. This was my own attempt some time back to get at my own “Finding our true purpose”
Translating knowledge into value. Are we allowing knowledge to be gathered, understood, applied and diffused with our organization’s in thoughtful, well-structured ways. We need to learn how to amplify the signals in why this resonates and then we need to share these. I can never get away from the Absorptive Capacity needed to have in place and to ‘allow’ this knowledge to flow across the organization.
Achieving impact and intensity. We do have to strength our resolve to perform. Innovation work needs to arrive at distinct outcomes that offer impact and intensity. This conveys’ change, it challenges the existing by delivering something better.
Building the capacity to perform. How we assess and improve needs to be ongoing. We need to articulate the values and core needs within the organization, we need to set aside learning and exploring time and we have to show the commitments to sustaining this building ethic. We need constant walkabouts for testing and learning. The future depends on it, as we are in far more in fluid and adaptive situations that the past where agility, creativity, and ingenuity are all required.
Aligning People, Technology, and Innovation. Technology is dominating much of what we do and how and what we do it upon. We are having higher degree’s of connectivity, interactivity and sharing opportunities than in the past to be engaged in networks, ecosystems and different relationship forums than ever before. We need to harness the essential interplays this requires.
Exploiting and Exploring. The realization that we need to operate in ‘dual minds’ and structures is at last beginning to be recognized as essential to master. We need to be constantly striving for the innovation balance: between exploring and exploiting. We need to tackle innovation in tow different thinking hats These are about learning, searching and delivering the winning value of ‘new generation activity’ by recognizing how we balance out exploitation (extending the life) and exploration (new understanding). These need separation and different approaches.
Creating Sustaining Value. So many organizations require re-energizing, of being re-equipped for the future in different skills and behaviors. There are so many spaces to connect into and explore and this will come from the asset orchestration that you provide (structuring, building and leveraging).

We need to not just know the appropriate resources; we need to work on the skills, processes, routines, organizational structure and disciplines that enable firms to build, employ and orchestrate mostly our intangible assets relevant to satisfying customer needs and which cannot be replicated by competitors.

Assets that deliver the new innovation needed, through attracting in collaboration efforts and integrating these into you own evolving resources by turning them into being far more dynamic and evolving in nature to met the future challenges.

Under these seven broad ‘capability building’ approaches we can build your future innovation into being ‘sustaining’. We need to distinguish ourselves from others, as we equally have to compete with them. If we do believe we have the unique potential both in our people and in the opportunities out there, then you have to be highly purposeful in your committed intent to build the capabilities, capacity, and competencies on a very consistent basis that offer that uniqueness.

If we do believe we have the unique potential both in our people and in the opportunities out there, then you have to be highly purposeful in your committed intent to build the capabilities, capacity, and competencies on a very consistent basis that offer that uniqueness.

How you set about this building I have, within this post, suggested a number of ways to ‘peel the innovation onion’ and can only state my willingness to engage with you individually in this. This is of course if you believe innovation is essential to your future, as I certainly convinced it is increasingly becoming mission-critical to master, which is my starting point always for building the capacities to innovate.

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Delivering the innovation core: building capability, capacity and competency.

@paul4innovating — Thu, 14 May 2015 14:12:44 +0000

Each organization needs to understand its strategic resources to build continuously innovation, so as to sustain and grow the organization; otherwise, it will eventually die, starved of what is vital to sustaining itself.

The resources provide the lungs that give oxygen; they need to constantly be nurtured, too breathe and pump new life into the existing.

For innovation the same applies, we need to consistently build our innovative resources, they give delivery of the healthy living cells to promote and sustain us in new value potential.

The problem is we often are not very good at maintaining our resources and innovation activity. We just simply do not sustain our efforts, we tend to allow them to drift along or become lopsided from one individual team’s efforts, while the others simply ‘wallow’
Equally, organizations rarely set about designing the right conditions, working towards the innovation environment that ‘delivers’ a particular state of being, so as to allow something positive to happen, it is just expected to happen. Do we even bother to check for the real pulse of our innovation efforts?

My belief is if we do not have a constant working and reworking of these conditions we can’t honestly expect our organization to build the capacity, capability and competency we need for innovation to take hold, embed and becomes the long-term driver of the growth our organizations need and desire. We need to design a more sustaining effort

How do you develop the capacity to be exceptionally good every day? It is this constant focus on building the capabilities that matter, yet often we are not aware of those that significantly contribute, against those that are necessary to have or simply those that we need around to maintain what we have achieved.

Combining capability with capacity and competence becomes essential.

It is the combination effect of skills, organization abilities, processes and learning that combines to get things done. They individually and collectively impact performance.

Are organizations clear on what makes-up their core competencies? Do they constantly evaluate these within a consistent evolving set of changing market conditions or are they rather static, inwardly driven and not outwardly aware?

I have been working on for some time –actually it seems for ever- on a framework that separates the static needs of working innovation with the more dynamic ones that make the difference and provide the abilities to turn every-day activity into more distinctive, breakthrough, radical or disruptive innovation outcomes.

This work-in-progress I keep building upon,can be explored on a dedicated web site of www.innovationfitnessdynamics.com.

We do need to plan a capability maturing pathway so as to move our capabilities and competencies through from often a current ad-hoc state.

We need to turn these into a more formalized and predictive, planned out state, which brings a more integrated approach so as to extract any synergies but allows for a decent level of autonomy to grow individuals, yet build teams that constantly ‘form’ and reform to tackle the challenges the innovation opportunity presents to bring those to successful fruition in better ways.

Organizations seem not to learn from common mistakes
The amount of inconsistency in innovation (fits and starts) ,the turning off and on holds the building of our capabilities and competencies to innovate continuously back.

We do need to have a consistent, well-thought through plan for innovation development within organizations that is a resource development plan that has its distinct budgets, plans and dedicated group that is accountable to deliver on these plans, updated like all others within the normal planning cycles of the organization.

Innovation needs to be central within the new business core

When are we going to recognize that innovation should be a real core of our organization’s makeup? I wrote a three part series about “moving innovation into our core” (here, here and here)

I concluded with the emphasis on technology within all our organizations that we are in need of a radical newly designed Enterprise-wide innovation process. One that is embracing and adapting constantly to all we have been learning about how innovation works and what technology, digital, networks, relationships and social streaming brings that all need to be fully integrated within this redesign.

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, often to it’s and the organizations detriment. as it is seen as something that does not fit the ‘norm’. This is today’s innovation problem

Innovation needs to be fluid, open, responsive; 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. It is really hard to turn this ‘randomness’ or serendipity into a system but certainly not impossible.

Recognizing differences
There are real differences when it comes to building innovation understanding and equipping your organization to perform at improved levels. There are different traits, actions and activities to think through.

Here are some of the needs:

Places where we are turning curiosity into reality and building our innovative mental abilities for growth, development and accomplishment, opening up and being receptive and then 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 seeking the new space from knowledge exploitation and exploration, redefining the organization edges, enlarging and enhancing our understanding, 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 centre, to allow our capability building, new competencies to grow and evolve. We focus on the constant need to provide the mechanisms so as to improved performance and capacities by focusing on both our mental and physical abilities to our position and function to explore and exploit. Each contributes to our ability to receive, hold and absorb new knowledge. We measure these by the increased volume and quality outcomes

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

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

In summary
The more we focus specifically on what makes up our innovation competencies, capabilities and capacities, delivering the dynamic ones that give innovation impact, the more we are able to comprehend what is important, produce added value and transform from what we have known into what we can see differently, opens us up more into the world of innovation possibilities..

It is developing the skill, knowledge and ability (or capability, capacity and competence) for innovation to deliver on its promise to sustain, grow and provide new value-adding outcomes that take the organization forward and it can no longer be haphazard but systematic and purposeful.

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We need the engagement platform for translating big data learning

@paul4innovating — Sun, 25 Jan 2015 12:47:41 +0000

Big Data is knocking very loudly on our door, how are you going to let it in and manage it?

How can we liberate that creative energy we have within our organizations, how can we achieve higher engagement?

How can we learn, share and transform the knowledge that is all around us, simply flooding in? How can we translate the data flowing in with the knowledge insights and innovation outcomes expected? How are we going to unleash the creativity that goes with new knowledge?

We need to actively encourage connected minds for value-creating opportunities and knowledge sharing for innovation to flow right across the organization. All the raw data needs connected and engaged minds.

“For this, we need to think about installing a modern engagement platform that has the knowledge and learning as its beating heart”

Why do we need to build this modern engagement platform? Big Data is knocking on your door.

We need increased capacity to ‘listen and capture’ understanding. We need to deploy some filtering and analytics as ‘big data’ becomes increasingly part of our organization’s lives. We need to go beyond analytics.

“We urgently need a system of absorbing and translating data’s raw power to turn these into measurable innovation outcomes”.

We need a structured system where we manage any absorption of data through its different stages of translation into valuable knowledge, to see its potential and then to realize the (new) value out of it for new innovation outcomes.

With all this new data flowing in, you need to turn it into valuable knowledge by capturing all the interactions, offering search and discovery services, organising different events and scenario management and be able to retrace the interaction history. We need to think beyond just data discovery.

“We need to equally build a knowledge-sharing system and this will require as much a robust technology solution as at the raw data front end structured on a scalable learning approach”.

We need to find ways to merge data and information to turn this into ‘actionable’ knowledge and eventual valuable new innovation. We do need to think harder about building beyond analytics into these engagement platforms.

It is here you actually mine the raw knowledge and transform it. We need to absorb in our organization’s capabilities or we will simply overload them with just data.

We need to shift from scalable efficiency to scalable learning.

Firstly and most important for me, is our need to understand the building of learning and experiences through the Absorptive Capacity framework as I think it will have an increasingly valuable part to play in managing data, information and knowledge going forward.

A fair time back two researchers, Cohen and Levinthal (1990) pioneered the concept of absorptive capacity, further defined as the ability of an organization to identify, value, assimilate, and apply new knowledge.

Since their 1990 publication, the concept has been further developed and given rise to many thousands of published papers on this subject.

The Absorptive Capacity Components

The value of absorptive capacity is that when organizations have some prior knowledge and awareness they are more receptive to adding new understandings and new ideas. They can build better value from not just the knowledge but the structured application of it.

“As ‘big data’ grows we need to move from potential to realized outcomes”

Organizations that encourage and set about learning consciously and consistently will set about the search for the new ideas coming from all the incoming sources by having this already established learning structure in place. They are far more likely to better recognize new ideas that might lead to innovation.

Exploiting our learning requires framing

I would suggest those organizations that exploit the Adaptive Capacity framework are more likely to develop a deeper understanding of integrating, exploiting and experimenting with any new knowledge. Then they are in that ‘better’ shape to set about placing the data and knowledge gained into a new setting, framing new concepts or hypotheses, to push this knowledge forward into new innovation.

“We need a structure where we are constantly, consciously advancing learning, extracting its value, turning this into valuable new potential and successful innovation outcomes.”

This gaining of continuous knowledge encourages constant learning and this has a positive feedback cycle as it builds the capacities and capabilities for future innovation activity for the increased potential for new value.

Absorptive capacity, once recognized and established as a system, promotes the search for new knowledge that greatly increases the capacity to make the necessary new connections for new innovation to happen.

The ability within our knowledge gathering needs a continuous focus and methodology of approach.

For this to happen, it does need continuous focus, we need to build greater absorption capacity. If organizations take the alternative route of wanting to squeeze every last drop out of the existing innovation activity or research department, organizations over time develop as bad learners, they begin to ignore, assume they have the knowledge and get fixed in their mindsets.

They totally rely on data and don’t apply their knowledge and they fail to translate this into meaningful outcomes.

Those that fail to seek out and absorb, will certainly tend to reject faster and increasingly adopt the “not invented here” syndrome. That can only last for a limited time before ‘innovation decay’ and ‘data overload’ do set in, people become frustrated and finally give up and leave, and when they do just remember all their knowledge goes with them also.

“There is a real risk that all the incoming data can be totally overwhelming, we need to structure a learning system to absorb, exploit and translate for measurable innovation outcomes”

In managing new innovation outcomes we need to apply absorptive capacity as a learning framework

We certainly understand that today innovation is not confined to the walls of one particular company. The world ‘absorbs’ more innovation than we can turn into greater value but we need to attempt to capture this and see if and where its value might lie.

If we agree that most innovations happen outside often self-imposed boundaries then we have to extend outside all our existing boundaries and go beyond. We have to open up our organizations and collective minds to draw in the knowledge so as to allow it to reside, circulate and be translated into new forms of understanding.

Absorptive capacities give us the system on which we can encourage the gathering, understanding and translation of knowledge. It underpins engagement and also helps manage the ‘raw knowledge data’ that needs transforming. We all need to be able to have ‘syncing’ capabilities of learning.

We need a system to capture and allow knowledge to flow, and a strong absorptive capacity has three main outputs which result from the flow of external or distributed knowledge that is allowed to flow internally.

“With the creation of new knowledge and insights, these can create new innovation that then leads to new economic and social value”

Achieving a clear engagement platform for all to gain from

So in our need to achieve a greater engagement from everyone within our organizations we need to recognize the importance of having a ‘modern’ engagement platform available, a central place for scalable learning to take place so we can structure the new knowledge and insights coming into the organization.

As we increasingly need to engage, where outside knowledge combines with our internal understanding and needs, then we do need to think about scalable learning to anchor and then diffuse new knowledge into potentially more valuable innovation outcomes that are measurable and linked back through the learning cycle.

The post We need the engagement platform for translating big data learning first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Building an innovation framework that has real capabilities as its formula as its heart.

@paul4innovating — Tue, 27 May 2014 10:38:48 +0000

I’ve strongly believed when you begin to think through a framework for innovation, see my last article as an example, you also should equally need to recognize the capability framework that you will need to build into this.

Working through these as essential combinations can become the real enabler.

Here is my solution that I think is worth working through, to firstly absorb and then consider for applying to your own innovation building activity. Try it!

I have worked on a formula SCA = II + OC + EE + MLC + RNE for this. I have never published the make-up of this in the public domain before, although I had briefly outlined it in a past post here.

In that post I outlined my thinking and I do not think it needs repeating, does it? So onward…….

The formula is the combination of positive relationships between the following interrelated parts:

Seeking out a working Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA)
What do you want to achieve from selecting the expected SCA outcome choices? What do you need to frame as the SCA by using the parts of the formula?

The extent of market advantage (posses distinctive advantage)
Competitor’s difficulties to duplicate this, where the unique advantage is often found
Strategic leadership is prevalent and nurturing and valued
Understanding “superior” marketplace position (in revenue and cost advantage)
Creating it, capturing it and keeping it distinctive
Facilitating, accelerating and sustaining the diffusion process across the organization
How do you seek relative advantage, achieve compatibility, reduce complexity, encourage trail-ability and ensure observe-ability?
Advancing the clear “line-of-sight” new business always requires to execute upon.
Looking to achieve better visibility, flexibility, extending collaborations and advancing concepts through technology and structured approaches.
Other strategic objectives require distinct capabilities to be built into these 5 groups

Innovation Intensity (II) and the degree of adoption

The extent of product, process, managerial and business innovation
A mix of technological and non-technological innovation
Impact of innovation expected through strategic leadership
The magnitude of change capacity required through innovation
The scale of innovation impact desired
Plotting out the roadmap for innovations evolution
Exploring the different types of innovation and their potential
The use of Business Model innovation to change the proposition
The essential linkage between strategy and innovation outputs and outcomes
Investment x activity x focus x disruption = return on innovation expectations

Organizational Capabilities (OC) in developing their distinct differences

New knowledge acquired and embedded, exploring the new contexts and ways
The ability for value-creating activities to be accumulated, integrated and transferred
Adaptive learning (leads more to incremental innovation)
Generative learning (willingness to question long-held assumptions)- favours radical
Relational learning (collaborative linkage, networking for open innovation)
Distinctive learning of new knowledge to create added value directly.
Experimental learning tolerance with new ways of doing things
Learning from both internal and external knowledge focused positions
Encouraging co-production of concepts (ideas, components, systems, R& D)
The ability to also unlearn (long-held assumptions, group-think)
Structural evaluations into routines, procedures, systems, culture etc
Releasing latent capabilities- discovery and exploitation- as capital in waiting
Linking the three capitals- human, structural and relational- for interactive leverage
Combining complementary assets and dynamic capabilities to configure & reconfigure
Build the technology skill sets focusing on collaboration
Encourage techniques for formalization, exploitation and generation
The value of Absorptive Capacity in acquisition, assimilation, transformation and exploitation.
Seeking out the buy-in from the cross-functional business units

Entrepreneurial Energy (EE) promotes and generates

Entrepreneurship facilitates generative-learning activities as the focus
High tolerance of risk-taking, exploring the unproven, seeing patterns and shifts
Pro-activeness in new directions, new capabilities, dynamics and mindsets
Use of accumulated capabilities (coordinating, preserving and supervising)
Key decision makers’ traits to investigate and encourage change, risk-taking propensity
Positive outlook towards diversity & different behaviours, discovery and experimentation
Providing a learning environment through trials and pilots that can scale quickly

Market Learning Competence (MLC) for establishing a clear awareness

Through marketing capability and market understanding vigour
Market focused to acquire, disseminate and use the knowledge acquired
Exploit through sensing & scanning conditions for diverse and unrelated opportunity
Possessing a close interaction with customers, users and suppliers
Ability and speed to react to the variability of the environment
Possess a high level of competitor awareness
High levels of customer orientation and “over-served”/ “undeserved” insights.
Always orientated towards innovation, not just new product development
Building agility and responsiveness to constantly changing market conditions
Getting to the “heart of the customer” in outcome-driven ways for their needs.

Relationship & Networking Effects (RNE) and its support to enhance

Building greater exchanges of knowledge through interactions
Encourage the constant practice of sharing
Promote systems of relationships and the structures needed
Strengthen alignment and appreciation of value-adding activities
Connecting Knowledge Management with finding ongoing Business Value
Combing Knowledge with constant practice & sharing
Support to enhance the needs and guidance through good governance
Resolve actively the barriers and concerns
Build trust, connectedness and belonging
Build a common purpose and share the vision
Build an identity and offer difference to stop the leakage of knowledge
Actively connect people to people, people to knowledge
Gain alignment, be transparent, build identity and encourage networking
Support the patterns of exchange, their impact on value,
Assess the dynamics and new value potentials in the different exchanges
Linking the collaborative efforts to define, align and stimulate innovation targets, strategies and initiatives to support ongoing and sustaining success
Measure robustness, diversity and renewal
Searching for defining and designing complementary platforms.

Brief background and some thoughts
On first take all this seems to be a long list, actually, this is offered on purpose. You add your own distinct needs within this formula but take care not to dismiss any suggestions offered here, without ‘good cause’.

The challenge is how you see it, how you value its ability to connect context and the content or aspects you want to focus upon. These structures or building blocks you can start individually adding your unique “flesh to the bone”.

Let this become an innovation capability formula that stays in your head and you constantly ‘walk around’ its parts to get an increasing connection and momentum to build its value from others needing to relate to what is important to building sustaining capabilities.

I got the original idea of this framework a number of years back by reading through some different thoughts that JayWeerawasdena had put together in a number of assorted papers. These assorted ideas and concepts partly fueled my idea that led to this ‘combining’ concept of mine, finally published here.

I feel we need to provide a framework that can be worked in ways that build your own unique capabilities. By focusing on these key components that do tend to make-up innovation that leads to sustaining ongoing competitive advantage you can frame and measure activity.

The other formula to measure this against

The one other formula I use with this is measuring its return on investment. This is

So a framework and a formula to measure innovation’s impact. Does this make sense to you? It has to me for years. I just thought I’d publish it a little wider than limiting it to a chosen few.

Really do think about it, experiment with it and see if it does not give you the increased intensity and focus you are needing for building greater capabilities.

I think you will find it does give you a powerful framework to build those capabilities around, needed to deliver real advantage going forward.

The post Building an innovation framework that has real capabilities as its formula as its heart. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Successful Innovation needs a common language, context and communicating

@paul4innovating — Sun, 23 Mar 2014 10:24:09 +0000

The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563)

People disconnect because they lack what is needed to connect! Innovation thrives from the knowledge and you need to make sure this is allowed to flow.

To achieve those essential knowledge connections, you need a shared understanding of innovation, that common sense of purpose as a framework. This will though, always stay a work-in-progress.

You need to begin to build a common language of greater understanding. We need to unite around innovation. Imagine if you work consciously to put knowledge in the hands of people willing to make innovation happen, what the potential might be?

Give people the power of the context for their innovation engagement and that shifts everything to give them a clearer shape and meaning. You are laying out the conditions, criteria and circumstances, giving innovation its foundations.

Connecting the seven parts of the Innovation Work Mat

In this series of articles I will be looking at each of the seven components within the executive innovation work mat to raise questions, to probe and prompt the necessary thinking that needs to be made in organizations around building innovation that sustains and delivers to the strategic need.

This is the fifth post in the series, here I’m exploring the essential need to build a common language, gain growing identity through knowing the context for your innovation activities by communicating these to build a lasting innovation connection and organizational awareness. This flows from the top and cascade down the organization to make the essential connections and alignment.

Giving people space through communicating the common understanding

What would happen if you allow people to openly invent, to brainstorm, to generate initial concepts and prototypes because they understand the strategic innovation framework. One that lays out a vision of meaningful innovation that would be valued as it is more aligned to the strategic direction.

For me, the executive innovation work mat moderates an organizations innovation. It can go much towards reducing the multiple interpretations and personal agenda’s of a variety of initiatives often described or justified as essential innovation but constantly miss the strategic mark.

Closing the innovation gap design

If you have in place a clear innovation framework you offer a communicating mechanism to guide innovation activity. The framework can establish a common language, a growing sense of common cause for this to ignite innovations focused activity.

You can cascade this down the organization and actively look for the cascading effect to flow back up in new ideas, a sense of engagement and purpose.

You are looking for everyone involved to understand ‘the bigger picture’, to look towards the communicating platform so they can move their innovation activity back and forth within the structures, processes and systems designed for innovation to align them to the organizational strategic need.

Innovation becomes increasingly more connected as it is more integrated in its designs, use of resources and outcomes, to meet the more complex challenges being face in a competitive world.

Engagement can become the behavioural footprint needed for change

If you give each person a sense of meaning, that explicit and implicit encouragement because this is coming to them in an integrated message- the seven components of the executive innovation work mat – it can shift their mind, it can direct their energies. Engagement can become the catalyst for exciting innovation if there is this sense of trust, continuity and the identification is well-constructed and makes sense. Organizations do need a commonly shared framework that moderates innovation

There are so many aspects to get right in innovation. These can be ensuring the culture, climate and environment for innovation are working well, it could mean setting up processes, well-designed procedures and structures, it can be providing innovation governance.

Each part has a vital part to play in being combined for innovation, so it can function but these are not the core. Our identification with innovation is that core.

Working on innovation needs a deep commitment

German Late Medieval (c. 1370s) depiction of the construction of the tower.

We need to work hard to communicate that innovation is different than ‘business as usual’.

The fact ‘we’ are building something different and we need to build this together. A counter to existing processes, the commitment need is to overcome practices honed over many years.

This needs thinking through in its value and importance.

If the Senior Executive is not totally involved in creating the imperatives needed in innovation then the organization lacks the context. Signalling the kind of innovation and breadth of impact – delivers the vital aspects.

Well stated innovation objectives can shift the focus of the organization substantially. It generates collective building capacity.

Incremental to Disruptive require different engagement points – actions send signals to the organization and having clear governance provides guidance to risk, principles and the mechanisms to manage these two ‘extremes in innovation and all in-between.

By providing a strategic innovation framework you provide consistency in purpose, you are aligning innovation to strategic need and by actively engaging across the seven components, sharing their conclusions, these can create the dynamic aspects and sense of growing identity. You need to send a compelling set of messages throughout the organization.

Innovation engagement needs a common language, a clear sense of purpose of innovations context and the mechanisms to communicate and cascade these intents throughout the organization to bring people onto the same page.

Obtaining a ‘given’ flow for innovation

Designing a new strategic innovation framework at the top of organizations helps close the many gaps we see today. There is a flow for improving innovation performance. If we don’t frame the business context how can we compare and contrast? How do we know what we are missing or what it is meant to be achieving? When we go about seeking out opportunities we need to understand the context these are placed in.

Educating, informing, clarifying constantly simply helps formulate understanding and aids execution. We need to find ways to communicate a common language, a common way to frame the needs expected from innovation.

When we work together we can move mountains

You can eventually achieve a common identity that begins to move ‘mountains’ through collective achievement, one that is both distinctive and unique to your organization. A clear uniqueness that can never be copied, one that allows you to stand out as true distinctive innovators, admired and even envied.

We get closer to achieving a consistent, more vibrant innovation as it becomes more routine and embedded, for it becomes increasingly linked to everyone’s goals, a certain oneness and because of this, it is sustaining.

We identify as we understand what our contribution will be, then the leadership has done its primary job, its aligned innovation purpose to the goals, by laying out the parameters to achieve this.

Successful CEO’s achieve organisational connection

CEO’s that are seen to be successful achieve connections, what is often called that emotional connection through describing the context, setting the values and vision-driven criteria and by often pushing the organization towards ‘impossible goals’.

It is amazing how this brings alignment as long as it is consistent, constant in its messages and widely shared and understood and the organization see’s the leadership engaging, visibly seeking and believing in innovation and what it can potentially deliver.

Delivering a coherent and consistent innovation message that resonates

The Choice Cascade Integrative Innovation Model

This engagement needs a different honing than most organizations are certainly not capable of delivering, without thinking long and hard about the way they must undertake a more transformational pathway.

I suggest the Choice – Cascade integrated innovation model. One that can connect and deliver a consistent and coherent innovating performance across the organization.

I believe there is an essential gap within the way we set about innovation today. There is needing to be well-articulated and well-communicated innovation strategy that flows both ways in searching for the best solutions that align to the organizational strategic needs.

We need to find more fluid and flexible organizations that respond through searching for innovation consistency. They need to have a ‘flow’ of knowledge, of clarity, of a sense of scale in their learning and dialogues that promotes greater successful innovation outcomes as the sense of on-going mission.

The orchestrator needs to orchestrate.

We need to align, offer clear vision and purpose and this needs orchestrating from the top of the organization to the bottom. Organizations need an integrated innovation strategic framework that can deliver commonality in understanding, in purpose, in language. Then this needs to be cascaded

To do this you must orchestrate the capabilities, to purposefully build innovation. Orchestration is fundamentally dynamic, full of uncertainties but the need is still to connect the parts. To orchestrate you need to communicate and conduct to make the innovation music

The important “C’s” of innovation

The Seven Components that make up the Executive Innovation Work Mat

For me, the central part of the Executive Innovation Work Mat has been deliberately placed, it conveys the important “C’s”of innovation.

This is made up of the search to build a common language, to put innovation in its appropriate context, to work on communicating and cascading this throughout the organization can spark the distinctive aspects.

The ultimate aim is identification, understanding and then build up the capability, capacity and competencies required to deliver on the integrated approach taken. This is led from the top through this work mat approach and fully cascaded throughout the organization to align and bring innovation to life for all involved.

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