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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The post We are in need of a common language for innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

In the past we have often believed it is the genius laboring away in his lab that has made the discovery that has led to real breakthroughs in innovation.

So often in the past this lack of making the invention connection has often held many of us back to become engaged in discovery, ideas or contributions as we felt discouraged, as we had felt innovation can only happen in these ‘special’ places.

Most of us became disconnected with the early part of the discovery for innovation, we simply became just the implementors, pushing the innovation through the pipeline into its final execution. That can change if we are willing and able to challenge our past assumptions.

In many ways we have still not fully broken with this ‘mindset’ on innovation of being someone else’s need to identify and discover those new ways, new designs and solutions. Thankfully though that has been changing, as increasingly the message has been delivered that “innovation is all within our jobs, irrespective of what we do”

It has been the opening up of organization thinking through technology that has allowed for this innovation to flow, to be captured, absorbed, translated and delivered back out into the world. It is from this multiple and diverse difference of innovation understanding that can freely flow ideas and concepts that can evolve into new innovations that deliver better value than what was offered in the past.

We do need to find this “sweet spot” for encouraging more innovation

We live in a world where we are having greater connectivity than ever before. We are increasingly engaged in far greater interactivity with the easy and access to the social and organizational tools than ever before. We are encouraged to share what we know increasingly so others can built on this, or shape its original concept into a different value proposition simply by having that triggering idea and seeing the ‘possibilities’ to build upon it.

Perhaps we have a new innovation equation to explore and exploit more

It is the degree of connectivity times the degree of interactivity times the degree of sharing, that is within our growing community that enables the innovation to emerge.

We need to find the spaces to innovate. Where else in today’s more open world where technology allows us all higher degree’s of freedom, discovery and ability to make the innovation space a vibrant one. One where it is the collaborating we undertake, that leads us to breaking out of the existing, changing the known, investigating the unknown by the ‘degree’s of our willingness to explore and exploit all that is around us, if we only reach out and be open to new levels of thinking.

The post Innovations Degree’s of Connectivity, Interactivity and Sharing first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recognizing differences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our innovation problem that never seems to change

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

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

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

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

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

In the past twelve months or even more, I think there have been some exceptional reports and thinking coming out of Deliotte’s group   on business issues

These have been from their dedicated practice centers, their University Press and the Deliotte Consulting LLP, mainly from the US practice.

I would regard their thought leadership as close to the top or even at the very top of any of the big consulting firms.

I’ve certainly gained some richer understanding as I am sure many others have and for me Deloitte deserve significant praise for investing in their thought leadership thinking.
I have been reading their interesting views on different aspects of business redesign through their varied and detailed reports that have included: “Work environment redesign”, “Employee engagement”, “Board practices”, “Developing effective governance”, “Integrated reporting for M&A’s”, “Field guides to practical IT, “Tech fusion for CIO’s” and recently a broad report around “Business Ecosystems”.

I’ve always followed closely the Deliotte’s Center for the Edge on their pioneering work coming from the likes of John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Tamara Samoylova and Duleesha Kulasooriya and all their research team.

They really do push the boundaries and thinking to prompt us all.

Here I just wanted to firstly publically acknowledge all this great work but to pick up on one part of a report, of 150 pages, that suggests the “CIO as chief integration officer”. It pushes the CIO role into a far more prominent role, which makes total sense.

The CIO needs to become the Chief Integration Officer.

As they rightly point out in the Deloitte Tech Trends 2015 report, as technology continues to transform existing businesses and their business models, the CIO is evolving rapidly into a key for integrating these significant changes occurring into the core of the business mission.

As the report suggests the CIO can not only be the connective tissue but the driving force of intersecting” all that is needed to work in this connected world.

Business strategy and technology cannot be separated, they need to be constantly harnessed and balanced as never before, in feasibility, resolving complexity and managing all the risks associated with the changes unfolding, leveraging all the potential of the existing with designing and exploiting the disruptive aspects coming daily at a business.

The level of collaboration and cooperation between all C-Level executives to the CIO is absolutely essential to respond in dramatically different ways than the past, it needs to radically be seen as a collaborative partnership not in adversarial ways, as often in the past.. IT has such a transformation role to play but it has to firstly ‘transform’ itself.

Overcoming political resistance and organizational inertia is critical for the CIO, starting with his own team

The following was a shortened checklist of suggestions offered for the changes that are needed to be brought into the CIO’s thinking, to dramatically alter the dynamics and perceptions of his role and contribution and that of the central technology group, from initally getting their house in order and then being recognized as critical to shaping the business future:

* Work more like a venture capitalist by adopting a portfolio management approach.

* Provide visibility into the IT “balance sheet” for an understanding the assets and how they align to strategic priorities in projects, hardware and software, data, contracts, vendors and partners.

* Organize assets to address business priorities by striving for operational excellence by mastering that capability by delivering on what is needed and then that moves the needle to earn the right to help shape the business transformation.

* Focus on flexibility and speed to advance agility, responsiveness, being adaptive in experimentation and innovation.

Then link the potential of tomorrow to the realities of today in the following suggested ways:

• Create a deliberate mechanism for scanning and experimentation
• Rapidly vetting and prototyping new ideas and optimizing for return on assets.
• Build a culture within the team and those associates that encourages failure by learning
• Think big, start small, learn and leverage fast and then scale quickly
• Collaborate to solve tough business problems
• Tapping into diverse thinking, assets and entities
• Actively engage with business peers to influence their view of the CIO role
• Focus on delivering on the promise of service predictability, reliability and efficiency’ as and when’
• Serve as the connective tissue to all things technology, linking the various initiatives
• Advocating platforms instead of point solutions, keeping adaptive and flexible
• Design continuously the architecture and its integration in optimal ways.
• Deliver ‘prime time’ to the business units the security, scalability and reliability.

Grabbing the present and future opportunities that technology is delivering

The role of the CIO and the IT organization under him or the designated person needs to rapidly change from those past perceptions of being remote and restricting the level of change that was required by the business unit to just do their job as expected.

I don’t think the suggested change list outlined above is bad for the incumbent CIO to think through and decide how they are going to change and be seen as embracing their own change.

The ownership of a digital strategy is somewhere where the CIO can be and often is accountable for and needs to show a decisive position on that embraces all the present and future business needs.

It’s design touches increasingly on every corner of the organization, increasingly in mission-critical ways and its capability to deliver on time, in the right way is absolutely essential.

Technology needs to be elevated from personal, sometimes entrenched positions, into a comprehensive plan, recognized for its grasp, perception, understanding and knowledge of what the business requires.

The managing of this really vital strategic asset, one of establishing efficient operations that can effectively do their job but equally lay in the foundations for the organization to respond to breaking and planned opportunities to grow the business effectively, as and when required is no easy task, it needs deep understanding and be conducted in a highly collaborative environment.

It is the CIO who needs to step up and take on this challenge as the chief integration officer but he needs his colleagues to see he has at his disposal the tools, structures, solutions and architecture to deliver on the promise.

The friction of the past has to be put well-behind all, as the organizations future is even more at stake than ever. Deloitte suggests in this report that: It is for the CIO to firstly, put his internal technology house in order, then really leverage the advances in science and emerging technologies, to drive innovation as the growth enabler and finally, re-imagine their own roles to focus less on technology management and more on the total business strategy for what is needed.

Solving the moment, delivering the future

There has never been a more defining time for the CIO to step up and fundamentally deliver on the promise of technology, by connecting an organization and aligning its parts into a cohesive whole.

One that leverages ‘all things’ available to take the business forward in strategically valuable ways as well as operationally effective ones, to grow its sustaining value in how it functions, responds and adapts in our rapidly changing and challenging world.

The post The challenge for the CIO is the fusion of business and IT. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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.

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

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

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

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.

The post Successful Innovation needs a common language, context and communicating first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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

So what are the hills we need to take?

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

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

Hill one is by abandoning quarterly reporting

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

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

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

The second hill is trying to regain stability in organizations leadership

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

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

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

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

Hill four- stopping the fad and fashion of innovation

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

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

Hill five- the ability to understand and stimulate innovation

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

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

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

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

Hill seven- taking explicit steps to foster an innovation culture

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

Hill eight- Ensuring you have a formal integrated innovation plan

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

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

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

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

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

Winning the battle for innovation

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

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

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

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

We firstly need to mobilize around innovation

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

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

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

The uphill battle for innovation is not an easy one

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

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

Planning our innovation battle requires the taking of different hills

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

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

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

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

So what are the hills we need to take?

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

amended -broken into two posts for ease of reading

The post Taking the hills, one at a time, for innovation advancement first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I recently participated in a survey for APQC that was looking to identify the hot topics within product development and innovation. One or two hot spots surprised me, others less so.

In the round-up of results almost two-thirds of survey respondents have placed refining the identification of customer needs and remaining competitive in terms of profit at the top of their product development agendas. I like the increasing emphasis on identifying customer needs

Among the potential research areas respondents were asked about, they felt that developing talent to drive innovation was the most important. The second one was around rapid product development: How to Move Products to Market Faster.

The one that really caught my eye was organizations have allocated the most funds to improvement in developing talent to drive innovation. This is heartening but also a worry.

We need to really stop and think about this before spending further funds

I think before we jump into spending more funds on developing talent to drive innovation are our organizations that clear on what they want innovation to achieve? Growth is one but how? What type of innovation is needed, what are the implications? Have we created the right conditions? I could go on but spending to develop your talent to drive innovation you do need a good understanding of the what for and where this needs directing.

A second voice of concern also caught my attention

Also this week a conversation caught my attention that confirms this growing concern I have had that innovation is becoming a major strategic issue. It does seem Strategy and Innovation concerns have converged.

Recently Rita Gunter McGrath a Professor at Columbia Business School and certainly globally recognized expert on strategy in uncertain and volatile environments was discussing the three top hot button concerns at the leadership level of large organizations. She discusses this here with Booz & Co.

So what are hot button issues keeping our leaders up at night according to Rita McGrath?

The three hot buttons she is constantly hearing across organizations are firstly leaders feel their organizations have not got the right talent or skills in the right place to lead projects.

The second is around the struggle of innovation and growth, and they are simply struggling in how to do innovation. In Rita McGrath’s view the organizations do not have systematic systems in place, when organizations do innovation it tends to be ‘one offs’.

The third and final hot button at present at the strategic level is a lack of line of sight and worrying about what is actually going on. These are leaving leaders not comfortable to make clear, confident decisions.

So are we seeing the effects of how our organizations have been managed over the last few years?  Is it all coming home to roost? The leadership may worry over innovation and poor growth but it is in really in their hands to do something about it. Spending funds on developing talent to drive innovation is part of the equation but it is only part.

So how are we going to develop our talent for innovation?

Does the leadership of organizations ever listen or read about innovation in enough detail to understand all the implications, constraints and pieces to put into place? Have they recognized their role within developing innovation as a core discipline within their organizations?

To care about developing a clear, strong innovation set of capabilities you need to observe and reflect on what is causing poor innovation results. A significant portion of the blame is because the leadership, for whatever reason, simply does not get fully involved. They need to determine and build the innovation capabilities into the core of their organizations day-to-day operations. It needs to be recognized as a core competence alongside all others.

How often do we hear about the constant time spent on validating innovation, arguing the innovations corner, the pleading for more resources, the layering on of unnecessary structure, demanding impossible ROI’s and the intense focus on the short-term. Innovation is often just failing to connect into the mainstream of organizations, yet we are told our leaders are worried about growth, not having enough developed talent to manage innovation and the projects yet innovation is in their top priorities.

 Yet they worry over ‘line of sight’. Their third hot button

Of course they do, innovation is constantly being driven into the dark corners of the organization, it is being treated as opportunistic, like a light bulb you can turn on or off when it suits the whims and fickleness that our organizations leaders often seeking to respond to a crisis expecting innovation to dig them out of it. Innovation needs to become systematic.

Innovation needs far more serious attention at the top of our organizations, it needs strategic innovation leadership. Until leadership leads by focusing back on the longer-term, innovation is going to deliver continued disappointments. Also leadership in organizations requires stability to sustain and deliver on their initial promise.

Aligning leadership, the strategy needs with innovation activity.

Leadership needs to recognize their role in making innovation a more sustaining discipline. They need to give this a focus where they initiate and provide the essential strategic inputs into a well-designed innovation framework and ensure this is put in place.

To develop the talent to drive innovation you have to put into place all the conditions, structures and guidance this needs. I’ve written consistently about the need for this by suggesting the value of the Executive Innovation Work Mat approach.

Setting the strategic innovation framework through this work mat approach allows for the structure to be put into place that will develop the talent to drive innovation. It provides the conditions and strategic innovation guidance.

Resolution for innovation starts at the top.

If our business leaders want to resolve the present hot buttons of poor growth, sporadic innovation and achieve a clear line of sight as Rita McGrath is suggesting, then I’d suggest you take the time to read what I have written about this, here on this site by entering ‘work mat’ into the search box for starters.

Gaining better understanding of structuring and building innovation capabilities

Building innovation capabilities to drive innovation takes time. I would suggest you find the opportunity to read the ‘White paper’ or the foundation document on this innovation work mat. Also some of the supporting articles over at my Issuu dedicated page here, where you can find different papers that can be visually picked out by the one to six billiard balls to understand the thinking behind this framework further.

Try to answer the seven parts to the innovation leader’s litmus test or exploring the ten great intractables for innovation resolution.  Each prompts the thinking. Innovation needs to challenge prevailing organizational thinking. Innovation surprisingly enough does needs to be justified so as to build its sustaining business case . it is through this structuring you gain the serious attention of senior management for them to address the role they play within this innovation framing.

I would argue you need to make the innovation value proposition afresh

Then, and I am being deadly serious here, you need to go and actually sell what systematic innovation really means as a real value proposition to the leadership.

This VP needs to focus on what needs to be done to turn innovation into the engine of growth and through its strategic design, put in place the vehicle to attract and develop this innovation talent. You are tackling the leaderships hot buttons of concern.

Any development of talent needs a well-structured approach but you need to put in place an awful lot to really give the type of returns these ‘driving innovation’ needs. If leaders are worried about poor growth, disappointed with innovation and worry over ‘line of sight’ then innovation capability needs radically redesigning. Much of the present innovation is caught in a legacy trap, this needs overhauling. How will you think about addressing this?

Do you want to really develop the talent to drive innovation? If so then talk to me, I believe I can deliver a clear return on your investment of allocated funds.

The post Developing talent to drive innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I had previously provided a review more on the Strategic and readiness part of the Imaginatik report, in my post “The coming age of innovation in 2014 and beyond” and less so on the other part discussed, the Process and Execution part.

It is the process and execution side that have more of the deeper issues to tackle and more importantly, the one’s that take considerable time if you are tacking culture and the environment to allow for innovation. They are far more complicated to provide answers too. I feel like pushing this along, here goes:

The process and execution of innovation is actually more challenging, it is where value creation lies or not.

As Imaginatik comment in their report: “developing an organization’s operational capacity for innovation is challenging” as it is the translation and organizational understanding that makes it work or not. You achieve or fail in the values creating process and that influences the commitment to innovation.

Although I’d firstly argue we need to fix the top of organizations far more initially, simply as if we can’t get the essentials right from this top viewing perspective, you simply can’t get the organization to respond.

If you lack good engaged leadership committed to innovation and a well thought through alignment of strategic and innovation objectives you will end up with often mediocre and disappointing results and an organizations puzzled and left in ‘fuzzy innovation land’.

Organizations will also never get into any  consistent “innovation rhythm” unless you really get down and get your hands thoroughly dirty in fixing the organization’s capacity for innovation and that takes a long time of dedicated effort and deep understanding.

Fixing it means it has to become aligned, to run at least in parallel with other systems, it has to show its worth and to do this, you must know innovations real value and contribution. You simply can’t be ‘airy fairy’ about this.

Until we recognize fixing organizations capacity to generate that good, highly prized consistent performance and expected value required, it will remain tenuous in the judgement of innovation’s value contribution at C-level and those competing for scarce resource.

If we can’t describe the benefits and its value contribution constantly, innovation remains as being constantly questioned and certainly resource-stressed, often out of ‘whack’ with the rest of the organizations structures and systems. Innovation needs to constantly demonstrate ‘return’

Innovation will continue to struggle unless we really understand its capital.

If we don’t understand where the innovation value resides we will certainly struggle to continue to build innovation’s position in the organization.

Today innovation is still regarded as ‘expendable’, sacrificed on the altar of short-termism.  This creates a growing uncertainty, often reducing innovation down as that no real ‘sense of urgency’ and becomes ‘contained’ in discrete projects, failing to offer that real, substantial, ongoing value for the enterprise.

We simply don’t ‘unlock’ the real value of innovation. If we lack the understanding and abilities to build this sustaining operational capacity for innovation we have ongoing problems.

There is the need as its longer term goal, to be simply fully embedded inside the organization that it ‘resides’ and simply becomes indistinguishable, it becomes the operating core, constantly aligned to the strategic needs and goals. Innovation’s benefits must be outstanding.

The Imaginatik report commented “When asked what benefits their respective organizations have received from innovation, nearly one-third of respondents said benefits were either non-descript and intangible, or were self-referential nods to improvements in the innovation process itself. Thus, the single most common answer avoided mention of any tangible, proof-positive business results from innovation efforts whatsoever.”  Surely this does not help the longer term health of innovation?

The report suggests three main conclusions that can be drawn from these findings.

“First, innovation can generate real, and sometimes very substantial, value for the enterprise – capable of adding hundreds of millions, sometimes billions, to the bottom line. However, many organizations have failed to unlock any tangible value from innovation – and therefore instead cite advancements in innovation’s cultural relevance, or process sophistication, as “benefits” in lieu of anything more substantive”

So why was it in this report that the most commonly mentioned innovation benefits were made around cost savings and efficiency gains? There are some real dangers in this in my opinion.

Innovation needs to substantiate itself, in its importance, its role and its enabler to create growth, wealth or shareholder returns and underlying value creation.

If it cannot or we fail to articulate it, innovation will remain “expendable,” it will remain vulnerable to the whims of the short-term as it is not ‘validating’ itself enough. The value from innovation needs better articulation.

Let me offer a place to begin on value creation.

Value creation should be a core business strategy.

Why do we have such difficulties explaining the value and benefits from innovation? We need to tackle this, the earlier the better. Innovation is made up of both tangible and intangible value. It is until we recognize the underlying capitals that make innovation capital; we will always fall short on providing its real worth.

Innovation outcomes are far more explicit if you understand these capitals that make up innovation. These are often called the intellectual capitals or stocks of (potential) value. These can be financial, manufacturing but more the human, social and relationship capitals.

These capitals transform raw ideas into the commercial outcomes. Working these capitals the value of an organizations stock can be enhanced or simply preserved and can equally diminish if not managed well and thoughtfully.

How best can we explain value / value creation?

Firstly value is the total of all the capitals I mentioned above; we need to understand what ‘makes these up’ in our organization. These are unique and when applied generate new innovation capital

Also value is the benefit captured by the organization, it is outcomes (of innovation and other things) to generate the market value and present and future cash flows within organizations.

Value can also be the essential achievements of the organizations objectives, it can be value created by the organization itself or by combining with others.

Failing to articulate the value creation of innovation

So if we can’t explain the make-up of the intangibles within innovation we often simply fall back on generalizations, non-descriptive and self-referral nods to ‘improvements’ and ‘cost savings’ and that tends to group ‘benefits and value creation’ into incremental gains. Surely we can do better than this?

We must start looking for more strategically important outcomes; we must unlock the knowledge and raw data and translate this into tangible results that can be clearly seen. To achieve this innovation needs to align itself to strategy and the organizations objectives.

Innovation needs to be a mix that has growing substantive benefits; otherwise it will remain on the periphery of the organizations activity. To become central, to drive growth, to create wealth innovation needs to be seen and clearly demonstrates its value.

Leaders, shareholders, stakeholders, employees all need tangible proof-positive benefits from the business results that can be directly attributed back to the innovation efforts. Innovation efforts need to be better understood and we gain a clearer understanding of where the value resides.

Innovation will remain tentative, always stuttering along, lacking this absolutely organization innovation rhythm if it is not fully understood in where it generates it capital from and what new capital and stock it provides.

Where should we start in putting the value into our innovation efforts?

Our innovation value needs to come from our abilities to articulate the business case, an area of notorious weakness for most organizations and its alignment into the strategic direction and goals the organization needs to pursue.

Not a bad place to start is constructing the business case on four value creation pillars, shown here:

Need– We need to always understand the place and value of innovation from the customers perspective. They ‘attribute’ value, we in organizations then set about convincing them it meets their needs.

We always need to search for the customer jobs they are looking to be done. This is where the real innovation value resides. Articulating these needs within the organization and delivering innovation to these needs makes for a more sustaining innovation appreciation.

Uniqueness– innovation to be valuable has to be new; it has to improve on the existing. To achieve this we need to value our other ‘uniqueness’ – the internal innovation capital and how knowledge is translated from the initial idea into a commercial offering. We need to build around uniqueness found in our organizations, but you firstly have to know where it is located!

Strategic direction– the imperative for innovation to be ‘seen’ as successful is to align itself to the strategic direction. We need to know this direction, otherwise innovation remains uncertain, often ad hoc and misaligned. It is incumbent on our leaders to align innovation and strategy.

There is no better place to begin than using the Executive Innovation Work Mat to make this a comprehensive document to give this strategic guidance and create the conditions for innovation to thrive and get into a sustaining rhythm

Core competencies– we need to know what is needed. Firstly to understand the type of innovation we want to achieve to align to the strategic direction and goals.

Again there is no better place to start than work through the “collaborative innovation framework” provided in a open commons platform. Building the core innovation competencies requires building the capacity to innovation, the capabilities and competencies to make successful, sustaining innovation to happen.

Value creation comes from understanding where it resides.

So to understand value you need to have a well thought through strategy. Briefly it consists of

1.  Recognizing opportunities that are going to create new value
2. You need to recalibrate your innovation radar and be selective on what offers new value, not just sustaining existing value,prune your pipeline to give additional ‘weight’ to what gives new value,
   
3. Organize the organization into having a distinct, unique and consistent innovation rhythm of research, develop and then repeating this, time-in and time-out. 
4. Lay in the essential rewiring the organization always needs for aligning innovation to strategic goals, by making important organization changes and rock- solid comprehensive governance structures and metrics that seek to measure ongoing value from cradle to grave and finally,
5. Reinforce the value by knowing the success factors within the make-up of value- exploring all the capitals and stocks.

Ultimately value creation has transformation power.

Value creation is a core need both in innovation and strategy. We do need to align our value creation story far better from our innovation activities. This is one of the critical sources of misalignment innovation leadership needs to address.

Understand the make-up of value creation, in the capital, stocks and flows and capture both the intangibles and tangibles better for the value creation story. If this is well seen, understood and determined, it will deliver more on that promise that innovation does provide.

We do need to work on the benefits and value story so much more, otherwise, innovation remains outside the core of organizations, always lagging behind the huge effort to support the business as usual

*What was useful was a framing article by Accenture: “*Business at its Best” Published in 2011

The post Where innovation value resides first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

In May 2013 Imaginatik fielded an on-line survey to 204 business decision-makers across a wide range of industries and from these results produced a report “The State of Global Innovation, 2013” just released.

I have found this report to be really an excellent understanding of critical issues that still need to be addressed for innovation to deepen its position within organizations.

I’d written my own predictions for 2014 before I had  only just read this report  just recently released. This was in my last post “Heading for 2014, will innovation change?” I see an even sharper agenda emerging for me.

To Imaginatik, I really can only offer the highest compliments for a well-structured report, thoughtful in its views and tentative forward-looking conclusions. It helps me greatly.

**For me this is the outstanding innovation report of the year 2013**

The report covers a variety of questions around Strategy and Execution

 Imaginatik asked respondents a variety of questions about their companies’ approach to innovation strategy, governance, leadership, process, and results.

The major findings of this study are divided into two sections: Strategy & Readiness and Process & Execution.

I’d like to summarize only the section 1 as my initial takeaways here.

Their Section 1 was focused on Strategy & Readiness  and explored the relevance of innovation as a management priority and dedicated enterprise strategy.

Imaginatik asked questions exploring topics such as:

• In the eyes of senior leadership, how pivotal is innovation for the company’s success?
• To the degree that innovation matters to senior executives, what is driving it as a priority?
• Who, if anyone, has taken leadership of innovation programs at today’s companies?
• To what extent have companies created governance structures for innovation management?

The present innovation state can be summarized by these two comments:

1. The overall picture is that despite the emergence of innovation as a dedicated business competence, most companies are still early in the maturity curve.
2. Much work remains before innovation truly has a permanent home within the modern enterprise.

Most of the comments following are directly from the report but summarized in my takeaways.

Innovation matters at a strategic level, but formulation of strategy is still middling.

Today’s enterprises are actually placing innovation as an executive priority and organizational mandate.

In terms of whether companies have chosen to make innovation a dedicated priority, the answer was a resounding yes, nearly two-thirds of organizations indicated that innovation had been a dedicated priority for two or more years.

Already, innovation has begun to show some longevity as a serious business trend.

So what are the drivers, it seems external change is driving the need to innovate

There is clearly a strong imperative to innovate among companies that have chosen to create dedicated innovation leadership and corporate governance plans. However, the substrate of “innovation” can vary widely from one organization to another, and between industries.

When asked about the main drivers for their innovation efforts, the keyword for our respondents was “change.”

The highest-scoring drivers dealt with major, potentially disruptive, external change: the changing business environment, changes in customer needs or preferences, and the need for markets or segments to enter.

Each of the four highest-scoring responses equate to the ability to either adapt to, or profit from, change in the outside world – including the changing external environment (48%), changes in customer needs or preferences (44%), and new markets or segments to enter (43%). More generally, lack of growth (37%) also scored high, presumably due to a changing world and the need to find new sources of growth.

By contrast, all of the lowest-scoring factors dealt with the incremental ability to compete better in existing marketplaces: responding to price pressures, responding to the moves of competitors, the need to scale concepts better and faster.

Most interesting, the two factors most associated with competing better in the same markets were dead last among innovation drivers: the need to respond to competitors, and price pressures.

• To summarize the drivers it appears that finding fundamentally new paths to differentiation and growth is driving innovation much more than trying to compete better in existing / established markets.

• The majority of respondents seemingly felt incremental change was far less important than re-inventing the playing field or finding brand new ways of adding value.

The efforts to build innovation capabilities has become fashionable for executives to tout

Are organizations doing that much too actually spear head innovation on the ground?

Overall, the findings show that although a vast majority of firms expressed innovation as a clear management-level priority, fewer seem to have created the requisite governance and leadership structures to make sure effective follow-through. Organizations have indeed only begun to create dedicated governance structures for innovation.

The survey data does suggest that today’s corporate leaders are creating innovation governance structures to address this disconnect: More than three-quarters (81%) of responding companies had some form of innovation governance.

Even more impressive, a surprising number (33%) of organizations reported having a central innovation group that was both a) driving a corporate innovation agenda, and b) working together with other functions and business units.

Struggling with the distinct rhythm of innovation

A big issue still remains that without someone carrying the torch, organizations often struggle to truly create this innovation rhythm.

When done well, innovation is a very different rhythm from business-as-usual – necessitating the productive coexistence of creativity and digestion, unstructured chaos and rigorous order.

Many companies are still new in their efforts to treat innovation as a top priority, and therefore they are still experimenting with corresponding organizational schemes for executing.

Leadership: Innovation is increasingly led from the top

There is now a strong trend for innovation to be led by a top-level corporate leader with responsibility over all types of innovation, not just technologies and products.

One-third of respondents said the Chief Innovation Officer (or similar) was the primary leader of innovation within the organization.

The CINO’s influence is still dwarfed by the CEO, who tops all executives both as the leader centrally responsible for innovation (41%) and for having (at least) partial leadership of innovation (77%).

Other than the CEO and CINO, other C-level roles are rarely implicated as the primary innovation leader – this may be caused by the prevalence of cross-functional executive committees – which was only barely behind the CEO as a primary pillar of innovation leadership (40%).

With more respondents indicated the CEO or a cross-functional executive committee as their key source of innovation leadership it becomes an interesting mix of innovation’s top management.

From my perspective it will be interesting to see where and how the CINO role develops to strengthen the discipline and function of innovation as a clear organization structure. Or will it stay caught in a similar ‘trap’ as the Chief Information Officer, often not a main player within the C-level hierarchy, often caught in rapidly changing situations, trying to adapt and re-align?

How these three actors of the CEO, CINO and Cross-functional executive committee build a sustainable rhythm will be a key to tomorrow’s best emerging practices of innovation. Hand-off, accountability and execution will need addressing carefully.

There is some big question remaining of whether the strategic follow-through eventually catches up with the generalized executive desire for innovation does still remains to be seen.

In the coming years, it will be interesting to see where the balance comes to rest between the CINO, the CEO, and the executive steering committee. To a large degree, all three are central stakeholders – and should have strong leadership roles – in the innovation program.

This is further evidence of innovation’s rise onto the executive agenda, the rational for which was explained well by one respondent: “Without the leadership team pushing the agenda, [innovation is] an uphill battle.”

“Many organizations in our survey acknowledged a mismatch between the upper and lower levels of innovation leadership within their organizations”

As one respondent pointed out, “Though the idea of innovation was initiated at the highest levels of management, at lower levels it is perceived as another thing to do, in other words, just a project.”

Respondents report significant strategic and cultural roadblocks to innovation success – suggesting that the effectiveness of these innovation governance structures still needs improvement.

In many organizations innovation still struggles to justify its existence as the demonstrable outcomes of innovation are not yet fully aligned with corporate objectives.

Even at a strategic level, respondents believed that the most important goals for the innovation program were new products and new processes. Yet the single biggest outcome of innovation efforts was cost savings, with process improvements near the bottom of the list of benefits.

My thoughts here 

For me, this understanding of innovation and its value is still at a high level of immaturity and the ‘massive’ gap between the desires for change, to deal with the disruptions occurring externally and the inner safety-first attitudes that are still prevalent is a huge struggle to resolve.This is our critical mismatch point to resolve.

Top management mindsets need to radically alter for innovation to finally take hold. There is a time to stop being ‘proud’ and ask those that relate to the rich potential within innovation and its different types for the help they need, to understand all the aspects required for it to be fully mobilised. A piecemeal approach will simply not work.

Innovation can galvanize growth, provide fresh jobs and provide that often missing identification within organizations, called ‘engagement’. It can transform your future. There is this urgent need to get off the cost cutting, extending product only way of thinking. Innovation is much bigger than that and it is the external forces that are forcing the C-level change in valuing innovation.

Some conclusions from this report

• Overall, the survey data, combined with respondents’ comments, suggests that most companies are still in the early stages of developing a well-articulated innovation strategy, despite solid strides in building first-generation innovation leadership and governance models

• Some of the conclusions were that Innovation has become a dedicated corporate function where the level of purposeful focus is attempting to be matched by a corresponding focus on high-level leadership/stewardship of innovation, as well as a corresponding level of corporate structure and governance of innovation.

• Imaginatik offers some conclusions that as the innovation discipline evolves, they believe that both the objectives and results of innovation will become more sophisticated, and thus increasingly well aligned with one another.

• They conclude that with the increasing development of new practices in leadership, management, process and execution corresponding to the unique challenges of breathing innovation to life within the auspices of large, siloed, traditionally bureaucratic institutions.

• For the time being, the relative mismatch of corporate innovation priorities and documented innovation results suggests that organizations still have a lot to learn with respect to both what are the most reasonable priorities and expectations for their innovation programs, and what are the corresponding best emerging practices for following through to make it successful and well embedded in organizations.

The report greatly informs me and I hope you!

The report tells me, there is MUCH work to be done at the top of organizations to shift their attitudes and make better connections.

Within the report lies much of the innovation pathway that most organizations still have to travel but there are some very encouraging signs the real innovation journey has  really begun and moving down a path to greater innovation fitness and that all important point, awareness.

Imaginatik suggest: “Eventually innovation will become more deeply embedded in the enterprise and it will be increasingly indistinguishable from operations, and thus increasingly well suited to helping the corporation side stay ahead of the furious pace of external change”

I would recommend you download and read all the report, to reset the innovation buttons for 2014.

Thank you Imaginatik for a really excellent summary of the State of Innovation in 2013. Roll on 2014 to see how we can resolve some of these critical issues.

The post The Coming Age of Innovation in 2014 and Beyond first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.