The object of the game is to navigate one’s game piece, according to dice rolls, from the start (bottom square) to the finish (top square), helped or hindered by ladders and snakes respectively.

Originally from India the game is a simple race contest based on sheer luck and I am beginning to wonder if we are playing a new version of this with innovation? This is called “bust or boom” or “success or failure” or even “maybe or maybe not,” or even “will we, won’t we.” It just all depends on our luck in rolling the dice, a serendipity with a darker twist that many companies seem to be playing with their innovation capability building.

The game came to mind as I read through a recent survey on Innovation

I have just been reading an Innovation report / survey from Accenture called “Clear Vision, Cloudy Execution” and I really do think we are playing with innovation as a game, it has some really serious implications within it that need more drawing out than possibly offered in my view. We should be getting worried that many bigger companies are losing the innovation game.

Accenture in a survey conducted with 500 US Executives leads with this conclusion:

“US Executives are unrealistic in believing they have the capabilities they need to achieve their bold goals. The truth is that most struggle to generate the returns they seek from their innovation investments”

Yet it seems companies are confident in their innovation performance, awarding themselves high marks as innovators, even rating themselves as very positive in their performance against their (known) competitors. So tell me where is the growth then? Why are our public companies continuing to buy back their shares, shrink their work forces and continue to chase the cheaper investment alternatives of relocating where the tax breaks continue to bolster the returns of short-term thinking?

Accenture in their report details (this opens a PDF file) rightly  points out “confidence is a good thing” but in their experience “that companies that believe they have superior innovation capabilities are less likely to take steps to improve their innovation processes, culture, capabilities and operating models”

Also “that leaders are less likely to appreciate (and explain to management teams) that innovation is a complex discipline that requires diverse approaches“. This is when you are on the ascendancy (often mistakenly) and throwing the dice and progressing up the ladder of my snakes and ladders analogy.

The issue seems to be on not really understanding how they innovate or what is needed to innovate consistently.

The snakes that are all around, according to Accenture, are that companies don’t learn from past mistakes, miss market opportunities and are risk averse. They have badly slipped back on these.

It does seem to have become a “board” game of playing with innovation on a “shall we, shan’t we invest, sustain or allow” what we have gained to slither away as we roll the dice one more time. This time we land on the snake and slid back on our innovation progress from a series of market failures and often start again, often with a change in the innovation leadership.

Before I get ahead of myself let me explain the origin of snakes and ladders  

Referring to Wikipedia: the game snakes and ladders was originally from India. “The game was popular in ancient India by the name Moksha Patam. It was also associated with traditional Hindu philosophy contrasting karma and kama, or destiny and desire.

When the game was brought to England, the Indian virtues and vices were replaced by English ones in hopes of better reflecting Victorian doctrines of morality. Squares of Fulfillment, Grace and Success were accessible by ladders of Thrift, Penitence and Industry and snakes of Indulgence, Disobedience and Indolence caused one to end up in Illness, Disgrace and Poverty. While the Indian version of the game had snakes outnumbering ladders, the English counterpart was more forgiving as it contained each in the same amount.

This concept of equality signifies the cultural ideal that for every sin one commits, there exists another chance at redemption. Have we this same luxury with the management and building of innovation?

The sins we are still committing in the name of innovation pursuit.

The Accenture survey of executives and managers within 500 U.S. companies reveals that six in 10 (60 percent) said their companies do not learn from past mistakes. This is nearly double the 36 percent who admitted to this three years ago when Accenture last conducted a similar survey.

Nearly three-fourths (72 percent) indicate their firm’s often miss opportunities to exploit underdeveloped areas or markets versus 53 percent three years ago.

More than two-thirds (67 percent) believe their companies are risk averse, a large increase from 46 percent revealed in the previous survey.

The survey also shows that 82 percent admit they do not distinguish their innovation approaches between incremental versus large-scale transformational change – meaning they use a single “one-size-fits-all” approach to achieve different goals.

Also most respondents said they have “big” innovation ideas but are missing an organizational “home” with the company. So their ideas often go nowhere.

“A significant gap exists between what U.S. companies want to achieve in the innovation arena versus what they are able to do,” said Adi Alon, managing director, Accenture Strategy.  “They want to innovate yet they need to take different and bolder actions to achieve transformational, major revenue-generating innovation. True innovation requires aggressive changes in technologies, operating models and talent.”

The recognition that the chances of redemption are certainly getting less

Yet also emerging from this survey was this really far more bullish view on disruptive innovation compared to the survey undertaken three years ago.

For instance, 84 percent said they believe innovation is key for their long-term success compared with 67 percent three years ago.

The same percentage of respondents – 84 percent – said they are looking for the “next silver bullet,” meaning a market-defining innovation rather than incremental iterations of the same products.

Creating new products is a priority for almost half (47 percent) of respondents, an increase of 20 percentage points from three years ago.

Accenture believes the building blocks of successful innovation are being put into place, few have assembled those fundamental elements in a way that drives the changes needed to generate the investment returns. I would really disagree with this with what they are indicating as the “sins of slippage” reported.

Accenture conclude “companies are embracing innovation as a tool to drive their business forward” but “they need to learn how to flex their innovation muscles with new thinking, new collaborations and new approaches to execution.”

They also are suggesting that it seems organizations have not yet learned clearly enough on how they innovate and can’t distinguish beyond achieving incremental performance gains and this executive desire wishing for transformational change. It still seems hugely at odds with their actual record (of performance) and the realities, shown in their responses to this survey and their belief and assertions of having innovation prowess and dominance. There is a significant mismatch occurring. This needs a far greater “call out” to recognize this set of inherent weaknesses.

Companies are seemingly playing this innovation game of ‘snakes and ladders’, rolling the dice expecting the “silver bullet” to power them up the winning ladder but then finding themselves suddenly landing on the snake (of reality) to slip back down. Innovation seems to still be left to chance, just like my game suggested and that is a risky game.

There are more snakes than ladders in the new board game of innovation

It is about time this “board game” of innovation snakes and ladders is put away and recognizes we are far more playing the “game of thrones” where the struggle is constantly evolving Kings and queens, knights and renegades, liars, lords and honest men…we are in a disruptive world where we are all wanting to play the ‘Game of Thrones.’

This game of thrones includes start-ups, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, competitors unheard of previously as suddenly arriving, emerging entities from ‘distant’ lands and those who see as adjacent or making new combinations powered by collaboration and new technologies, all wanting to surround and dethrone the incumbent. This is today’s reality.

Listening to the messenger we might be mistaking our real position

I disagree with Accenture that “embracing innovation as a tool,” it needs to be a real core, not simply a tool ,within our companies; better funded, understood and defended, it should not slip back as it seems to have done, indicated by the results from this survey.

Equally I feel in the results that companies are not on the right path unless we enjoy the game of constantly slipping back is not how I would be reading these results, yet Accenture are suggesting this.

I do think they (Accenture) have some of their conclusions wrong and are not delivering the serious messages this survey is bringing out in a way they should. Innovation is not a game to be left to chance, the roll of the dice or the ‘quiet’ acceptance of playing seemingly ‘snakes and ladders’ with it.

Having “building blocks being put into place” after years of talking about innovation is a real concern. I would have thought companies should be far more ahead than this. If the survey results are indicating such deterioration’s in some of the most critical aspects I feel the report seems more advocating a “quiet acceptance” whereas the results are a disaster.

I can’t understand the approach here. I would argue Big Corporate America is deluding itself on its innovation prowess it has serious issues to address if it truly believes growth will come from innovation if it is accepting this deteriorating outcome. It is the consultants role, from its data, to paint the ‘realities’ of this in starker ways. I would.

Accenture might have reported this outcome differently than it chose too. I think they missed the opportunity to deliver a darker warning here. Perhaps they felt not equipped to deliver this starker message but I believe they should have, the deterioration is worrying.

The world is not waiting for those steadily putting in place their building blocks

In my take on the world today, the reality is, we are all facing an increasing world of disruption and simply believing in finding (by chance) or just looking for that ‘silver bullet’ is not a winning position, it is a gambling one. Have our larger companies taken up the role of a gambler, enjoying the thrill of simply rolling the dice but more than likely not have more than ‘equal chance’ of winning the game. Are they feeling beaten already? It increasingly seems so. Innovation is an imperative we can’t afford to let slip back.

Having a good, clear focus on innovation, its value, contribution and the commitment it needs helps stack the winning odds in your favor or at least, equips you to fight in a really changing, challenging world we are presently in.

The real warning signs big US business is in deep serious innovation trouble

It does still seem that many US executives are deluding themselves on their innovation competences. Their mistaken beliefs and lack of real understanding of the complexities within good innovation management should not left to the ebbs and flows of chance, whim or short-term thinking. The need is by seriously putting into place a dedicated structure, well resourced and competent team,  built from a comprehensive understanding of innovation and its management. That requires a deeper thinking than most are prepared to do.

If executives continue to accept not to learn from past mistakes, constantly miss opportunities to exploit, big ideas are going nowhere and remain risk adverse, yet they keep looking for the ‘silver bullet’ as their solution, they are in deep trouble.

Watch out others are playing a different game

It is far more likely to come far too late for many incumbents as others, schooled in lean and agile thinking, searching for unmet needs or under-served opportunities will have disrupted them, well before this as they are constantly learning from their mistakes, consistently experimenting, exploring and exploiting opportunities by pivoting constantly, in the pursue of big ideas and embracing risk. That is a bedrock of much of the thinking that goes into innovation, market development, change exploration and growth generation

I would be very troubled to read this Accenture report if I was Corporate America.

The tone of US companies being on the right pathway, suggested by the authors, doesn’t help when you have such big boulders causing giant gaps in this innovation journey. It does seem the need to find a new pathway of innovation needs urgently finding.

We can’t afford to play this game of ‘snakes and ladders’ with innovation anymore and this survey should be a real wake up call to all those living in their ‘corporate’ ivory towers the real world is ‘eating you for breakfast, lunch and dinner’, the attacks on your established positions are constant, global and relentless. If you don’t feel surrounded, you soon will be.

This is the right time to wake up to the realities and reading a report / survey as seemingly benign but potentially lethal as this one from Accenture, one that on first read it might seem, is ‘clothed’ in reassuring tones,  yet it does seem to have some very worrying messages within it, believe me.

I would be very worried within the large US companies equally if they just take the suggested medicine offered here in this survey , they need to really forge a new more radical innovation pathway but will they simply keep playing the innovation snakes and ladders they seem to be doing?

The post Are we playing snakes and ladders with innovation? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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.

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 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:

* 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.

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 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 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.

The post Delivering the innovation core: building capability, capacity and competency. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

So this is the reworked opening thought to record the idea to ‘capture’ it, so I can reflect later on, on how I should build on this further. I show a number of hyperlinks to help in pulling this together…..well for me anyway!

So this is a work-in-progress and should be taken as a thinking out loud at this stage.

Linking capability through interlocking platforms
We are in need of a different “sustaining” capacity build around innovation as its continuous core, constantly evolving, adapting, learning and adjusting, in perpetual motion.

How? Innovation has many ‘touch points, a myriad of dimensions that need to be aligned and integrated. How can we achieve this more holistic view, so innovation management can make a significant advancement on where we are today?

Making the business case for innovation to change is not easy but essential

Innovation management is today, mostly standing outside organizations operating structures. Due to this, innovation is often missing the critical line of sight from top management and it often suffers accordingly.

The numerous resource constraints, a lack of cohesion, alignment and seen creation value are becoming a real performance drag against rising expectations and needs.

Capabilities, capacity to innovate well, and the competencies are sub-optimal. We need to achieve a greater line-of-sight into the makeup of these for raising the potential of our innovation activities.

Innovation needs to be more central in core process thinking or we are in danger of staying with the same as it seems sort of comfortable. We actually do need much to shift, more radical thinking in our future innovation design, all getting possible through technology and the wonders of the cloud.

Do we grab this shift in incremental bits or push for a more radical redesign of the innovation process? I would argue we can grasp the opportunity to redesign it through our understandings of what we have learnt about innovation to date, bring in the solutions through technology that offers innovation so much and find solutions that can deliver innovation into the core of organizations, so it becomes seamless and the critical enabler or driving ‘engine’ of the business going forward.

One critical design thought I have is having three mutually supporting capability building platforms

Within an organizational setting, you need to have in place three supporting building platforms: 1) organizational support, 2) knowledge and competency gathering abilities and 3) a clear innovation process to channel themselves through, as final products or new services. All three need to be in place. They stack together.

If you have these three platforms in place you can begin to move from more of an ad hoc set of capabilities through to a more integrated, synergistic and interlocking set of capabilities. A complete picture where you can see and exploit differently when you are needing existing capabilities to be brought together differently and combined in unique constantly evolving new ways.

Well that’s the theory.

Organizational support platform is made of proving clear leadership and commitment to building capabilities, set in place an infrastructure that accesses, anchors and diffuses capacity so it not just flows but is constantly creating and exploiting for new economic and social value. You need to make sure the conditions for a trusting environment and climate are actively worked on and supported, and finally, provide the resources and ways to measure this to support and re-enforce the value of each corporate initiative. You should take a look at an earlier blog here: http://bit.ly/mV7zjP.

Knowledge & competency platform is where you permit time to discover and absorb what is being made available. The key absorptive capacities mentioned above. Deliberately allowing the time to explore both the external world and the internal world, and then setting about to capturing this ‘new’ knowledge through clear consolidation techniques and technology is vital. Knowledge should focus on a given core and context of what the organization is looking to achieve and want to learn from/about. You need to explore explicit and tacit knowledge. See my recent blog on the value of tacit knowledge: http://bit.ly/sthlG1)

Innovation Process platform lies at the heart of your innovation capability needs. This I have called the Innovation Business Architecture within work I completed with Jeffrey Phillips of OVO and can be viewed here http://bit.ly/ggKQCs . The process needs to have in place the capability to explore, to converge, to keep moving through the innovation pipeline a portfolio and be able to consistently consolidate and further exploit the ‘raw’ material of ideas and concepts by designing in some controls and risk management. Other thoughts for thinking through the innovation process are discussed here http://bit.ly/ikgR4f as well.

Moving from ad hoc to an integrated, synergistic and unique state
It is not just simply having in place the three platforms outlined above; each is a building block on top of one another, dependent for the ‘strength’ of the interlocking structure, to achieve an ongoing momentum that reduces many of today’s ad hoc capabilities, often hidden and undervalued into to this integrated state where the flow and connecting can enable a much higher level of performance through the greater line of sight and then applying more the appropriate resource inputs and training.

The need is to recognize that you do move, over time and dedicated effort, from ad hoc availability into a more formalised and recognized capability building process, it covers a more broad-based structure where the three-building platforms become tightly integrated to gain a more synergistic effect.

Then those that participate can see and learn from this growing innovation capacity feeding into the three platforms. Overtime will also provide increasing self-governance as it becomes visible to all.

The need for external inputs is essential

Building the internal capabilities happens by the way it ‘embraces’ the world. The more you seek, the more you gain, and the more you are able to see new possibilities. Seeking knowledge externally clearly comes from the encouragement of exploring networks, and building relationships – accessing the external capacities through scanning, scouting and collaborating openly.

Finally, market-learning capabilities feed into this cascading need

The real strength of appropriate innovation is designing in the right tension points – see my blog post http://bit.ly/tUQBml on this. Appropriateness has to be designed in.

Set within these platforms you need to build in new (ongoing) capabilities for Co-creation orientation, Customer Knowledge Acquisition, Customer Sharing Dialogues and Information Interpretation.

This knowledge becomes your collective memory where capabilities learn and grow from these customer conversations, actively sought. Not only will you learn, but you have to unlearn here. Having a reflective market-learning outcome part enables new learning opportunities to be embedded and often triggers behavioural change.

For me, I feel the “cascading effects” are underappreciated and I have suggested in an earlier post the cascading frame and possible outcome benefits of approaching this.

A short ‘call to action’ summary

I would argue strongly the need to focus on the value of having a clear innovation capability platform structure needs to be a ongoing transforming one pushing the organization into a perpetual learning one, that draws in from each of these different platforms to be combined up to meet and address the tasks and challenges it faces. These are unique to each environment.

We need to bring innovation into organization alignment and make it more central to its organization core and that I have suggested a work mat alignment framework to help in this.

This growing capability for increased innovation maturity can offer much.
I need to thing about what makes up each of these platforms and know the points where they interlock and feed into each other. That is another stage of thinking to be undertaken to validate what seems a ‘good idea’ into something that will work.

If you want to find out more, keep tuned in or simply track me down. These are some of my early thoughts so as I said previously stated, as a work-in-progress.

I keep looking to find the ways and the means for building innovation capabilities and capacities. It is my passion and focuses on what I like to do in my innovation activities.

What triggered this thought was based on an academic paper from H E Essmann & N D du Preez advancing the view of maturity application and innovation models.

The post Building Innovation Capability Through Three Interlocking Platforms first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Let me share the part that works really well for me. This relates to approaching social media but it equally applies to building innovation capital, it is recognizing and then building the stock and the flows around innovation.

Robin Sloan does a brilliant job of explaining this:

“One of the biggest takeaways was the concept of stock and flow. Do you know about this? Couldn’t be simpler, and really, it’s not even that much of an a-ha.

There are two kinds of quantities in the world. Stock is a static value: money in the bank, or trees in the forest. Flow is a rate of change: fifteen dollars an hour, or three thousand toothpicks a day. Easy – too easy.

But I actually think stock and flow is the master metaphor for media today. Here’s what I mean:

• Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist.
• Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.

I feel like flow is ascendant these days, for obvious reasons—but we neglect stock at our own peril.
I mean that both in terms of the health of an audience and, like, the health of a soul. Flow is a treadmill, and you can’t spend all of your time running on the treadmill. Well, you can. But then one day you’ll get off and look around and go: Oh man. I’ve got nothing here.

But I’m not saying you should ignore flow! No: this is no time to hole up and work in isolation, emerging after long months or years with your perfectly-polished opus. Everybody will go: huh? Who are you? And even if they don’t—even if your exquisitely-carved marble statue of Boba Fett is the talk of the tumblrs for two whole days—if you don’t have flow to plug your new fans into, you’re suffering a huge (here it is!) opportunity cost. You’ll have to find them all again next time you emerge from your cave.

You can tell that I want you to stop and think about stock here. I feel like we all got really good at flow, really fast. But flow is ephemeral. Stock sticks around. Stock is capital. Stock is protein. And the real magic trick in 2010 is to put them both together. To keep the ball bouncing with your flow—to maintain that open channel of communication—while you work on some kick-ass stock in the background. Sacrifice neither. It’s the hybrid strategy.

Anyway: this is not a huge insight, I know. Mostly I just wanted to share the lingo, because it’s been echoing in my head since my first microeconomics course. Today, whenever I put my hands on the keyboard, I’m asking myself: Is this stock? Is this flow? How’s my mix? Do I have enough of both?”

Source: Robin Sloan http://snarkmarket.com/2010/4890

He also added “You’re totally right about the interplay; when everything’s working together, stock leads to flow leads to stock”. “Building bridges between stock and flow”

The post Building bridges between stocks and flows first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Just begin to work through these ‘thoughts’ to begin to evaluate the value of knowing your innovation fitness so as to find out what makes up your distinct dynamic capabilities:

• By firstly mapping out your innovation capabilities to the task at hand enables you to understand and relate to what is needed – we call that the context for innovation.

• Innovation Fitness Landscapes helps in this task by identifying the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts‐ and apply the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain or challenges you are facing.

• The greater understanding of the ‘fitness points needed’ can transform your innovation landscape potential, or in business parlance, achieve your goal.

• Achieving this fitness accelerates your opportunities into final tangible outcomes. Here is a little bit of the theory:  you look for those critical factors that will give higher value potential or ‘peaks’ that are more valuable to your needs.

• The more ‘rugged’ the landscape, the tougher the innovation challenge, can also determines the greater fitness for the rate of innovation needed.

• The height of the peaks in these landscapes, the greater value placed upon them, illustrates how intense the innovation challenge is, and the number of critical peaks shows how diverse its potentially is to then provide the appropriate resources.

• The ability to identifying the emerging patterns provides the need to act and invest, making adaptive even exploratory walks to provide the appropriate resources needed.

• Understanding these will enable you  to move you to the higher fitness points where innovation viability is enhanced and needed to be so as to resolve the challenges faced.

• You need to experiment, to take these exploratory ‘walk’s to realize the potential and learn how to scale accordingly.

All I’m doing here is prompting you to ask questions. We can discuss ways to tackle and resolve the questions this can arise and apply solutions to build your distinct innovation capabilities to offer you a more sustaining innovation future. Intersted?

The post Do you know where your distinct innovation capabilities come from? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I’d like you to work through these ‘thoughts’ to begin to evaluate the value of knowing your innovation fitness and what makes up your distinct dynamic capabilities:

By firstly mapping out your innovation capabilities to the task at hand enables you to understand and relate to what is needed – we call that the context for innovation.

Innovation Fitness Landscapes helps in this task by identifying the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts‐ and apply the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain.

The greater understanding of the ‘fitness points needed’ can transform your innovation landscape potential, or in business parlance, achieve your goal.

Achieving this fitness accelerates your opportunities into final tangible outcomes. Here is a little bit of the theory:  you look for those critical factors that will give higher value potential or ‘peaks’ that are more valuable to your needs.

The more ‘rugged’ the landscape, the tougher the innovation challenge, can also determines the greater fitness for the rate of innovation needed.

The height of the peaks in these landscapes, the greater value placed upon them, illustrates how intense the innovation challenge is, and the number of critical peaks shows how diverse its potentially is to then provide the appropriate resources.

The ability to identifying the emerging patterns provides the need to act and invest, making adaptive even exploratory walks to provide the appropriate resources needed.

Understanding these will enable you  to move you to the higher fitness points where innovation viability is enhanced and needed to be so as to resolve the challenges faced.

You need to experiment, to take these exploratory ‘walk’s to realize the potential and learn how to scale accordingly.

As you begin to think of your capabilities to innovate it raises critical questions around “are we focusing on the right ones to deliver on the challenges we are facing”, “what can we do differently” and “how can we identify those critical ones”?

The post The value of fitness landscapes as part of your innovation awareness first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

What is so remarkable about innovation is that it can be highly dynamic.  It’s a task that anyone could do, given the time, education, clarity of purpose and commitments from our organizations, those that recognize the true understanding of the contribution all their people can potentially make towards innovation.

Today, too few people are actually allowed to work on innovation activities, yet the outcomes are ones that everyone wants, and certainly want to be part of. We all want that sense of belonging, of working on or in something that is exciting, dynamic and forward-looking.

We really do need to find ways to allow innovation to be part of each person’s daily jobs. Having a sense of purpose to improve or change something through innovation is such a powerful enabler.

Getting from where we are today, seemingly bogged down in many of the legacies of past innovation understanding, seems to me something we must tackle sooner than later also.

There is no time like the present to overhaul the existing innovation thinking and upgrade it with a faster, more focused innovating machine that yields greater returns due to this overhaul .

We do, in many of our larger organizations,  still seem to have a real reluctance to make the really investments needed, for building more robust innovation systems and structures. Why is that?

Often we even can’t adopt a basic common approach to innovation as a minimum and this will continue to limit all the ‘promise’ that is surrounding innovation. Innovation remains often poorly aligned and isolated, still disconnected from much that is going on within our organizations, where it can make such a contribution.

The choice is the innovation express train or the one that ‘stops’ at all stations.

Recognising some of market challenges and their implications that are coming rapidly towards us we have choices. We can jump on the innovation express train as long as we make a higher investment.

Of course we can take the easier, cheaper option of following along, on that slow all station stopping train, which jogs along, getting further and further behind that faster one speeding out into the distance.

The problem is, far too many organizations decide to save their money and not invest in a more promising future where innovation can take them, they stay locked in the present.

When they realize, often they have left it far too late to arrive at any ‘growth and opportunity’ destination, they have found themselves shoved into a side track while the express passes them by.

Some of their wiser competitors have already arrived and often well on their way on different journeys of exploration and discovery. These were made possible by investing in the right understanding of all the connections needed and knowing clearly the reasons for those chosen destinations.

Some of those competitors were looking out of the window of the express train as it passed wondering why you are not ready to connect into this train and still standing still, waiting. They recognized the potential advantage in investing in innovation.

Buying the innovation train ticket you have the choice of classes. There is ‘just’ incremental innovation but you might want to explore the more radical, breakthrough and business model opportunities that are requiring different innovation capabilities and skills. By making the appropriate investment, experimentation and exploration the innovation journey has a potential for sustaining a real momentum.

What are the implications of not advancing in innovation understanding?

We do need to rethink how innovation fits within the organization. If not then we will never achieve innovation’s real potential and we will be left simply standing in those less important places or me-too organizations watching as the innovation express train rushes past, heading for growth and opportunities for those who have the innovation ticket.

A ticket paid for by building the right innovation capabilities, capacities and competencies to make success happen. A 1^st class ticket where the new routines are sustaining ones, aligned to strategy, built on sound foundations and practices that give you the inside track to better innovation destinations.

The willingness to explore

We need this growing willingness to explore the different types of innovation and deepen the understanding of what each type can provide as a deliberate policy is altering the competitive landscape even more in the chase for growth.

Establishing the right approach, and experimenting to learn what can become the right business proposition in its design is becoming a ‘must have’ skill in evaluation and execution. We need to adapt, be agile and flexible, we need to have a clear sense (and understanding) of the worth of innovation.

Where is your organization?

So is your organization still sitting on the slow train or is finally recognizing the value of investing for a faster growth and business prospect by jumping on the innovation express.

To allow the innovation train within your organization to move onto the mainline, that faster track, to growth and new business opportunities that offer new jobs, you need to make a sustaining commitment to understanding ‘what makes up innovation’ in its capabilities, competencies and capacity to exploit all its value-generating points.

There is a growing hope we are in the final death throes of the older organization regarding innovation, treating it as not mainstream but isolated and disconnected.

Innovation should be a core competence. Investing in innovation offers the future, it allows you to speed up your activities and get to the destination of your customers’ needs a lot more effectively as well as potentially offer more of an exciting experience for those aboard.

This is certainly the time to jump on the innovation express.

The post Innovation can be so remarkable if we can fully embrace it first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

This is my adopted approach to work through this in a systematic way.

No question, this is designed to make sure those involved take their time working through the different levels of understanding needed. A journey where you ‘transform’ your innovation capabilities is likely to be realistically over twelve months or more. So much does get in the way to deflect you, to block you, to divert you. This is the nature of organizations, any approach to making ‘transformational’ change, and this is what this is, needs to go at the right speed and deal with the obstacles and constraints in thoughtful, well designed and clear ways.

Why is this potentially a long journey?

Well to appreciate what you require you must firstly need to understand not only what you have but what it currently provides.

Then you need to construct a clear strategic position of where you want to go in your innovation activities and these are totally different and unique to each organization.

Any journey like this needs to be well thought through, considered for all its implications and potential impact and disruption to what is existing.

It is a journey you have to want to travel and your fitness levels need to be progressively built up.

So these steps may have ‘individual wrinkles’ to them but most probably follow the same innovation discovery pathway.

1. Getting Started – Understanding the Needs & Imperatives of Innovation Fitness

• Why we must travel this critical path for Innovation.
• The meaning of dynamic capabilities and innovation fitness landscapes
• Merging  the theory with practical reality to produce new outcomes and positive results.
• Focusing on resources and performance – why is this important
• The problem is knowing what we have and what we really need

2. The Fuel of Innovation Performance – the dynamics of innovation

• A sharper, clearer focus on innovation resources to meet strategic need
• What is known about resources to sustain, enhance performance
• Knowing and aligning  your strategic criteria – for sound innovation approaches
• Getting innovation within the right context of your business
• Moving your resources in the right direction

3. Getting even more specific – quantification and qualification

• Recognizing the building of scale, change rates and dynamics that happen over time and why we need to constantly build our innovation capabilities.
• Developing the resources to meet the need – structured, focused, clarified by bringing out the necessary discussion.
• An illustrative scenario for a directional innovation fitness landscape map
• Recognizing resources can come beyond the firm and bringing these in successfully. Managing within a more open environment.
• Achieving  mutual dependencies to support; recognizing the hindering ones
• Being aware of  the impact of different scenarios in the management of innovation

4. Building the Innovation Fitness Machine – reinforcing feedback, identifying needs

• Recognizing the current status, spotting emerging patterns, seeing spaces and gaps and identifying solutions.
• Beginning the ‘adaptive walk’ to get to higher fitness points needed to compete.
• Clarifying the complementary resources, looking to embed new routines quickly and set up follow through approaches.
• Introducing natural tensions into the system to trigger ‘step change’
• Resource dependence climate, culture, diversity, intensity and uniqueness
• Reinforcing feedback – watching for dangers, managing the machine capacity, removing the brakes selectively
• Shifting your resources need not deplete or force other people to compete for them – working through the tensions within teams and silos.
• Matching resource dynamics with the innovation value chain & life cycle stages
• Simulation modelling the ‘what ifs’ and ‘why’

5. The Strategic Architecture – designing the system to perform as needed

• The step process for designing and executing the architecture design
• Diagnosing performance challenges and road blocks – resolving, moving on
• Lining up the solutions is not a linear process and needs careful management
• Addressing the effects of intangibles in the Strategic Architecture.

6. The Hard Face of Soft(er) factors – the hidden power of intangible resources

• Clarifying the impact of the intangibles and recognizing time, climate and conditions are significant contributors to innovation activities.
• The different rivalry types: internal and external, inter department, inter projects and working through resolutions to these.
• Reflecting feelings and expectations, addressing all the different needs
• Measuring the tougher parts of intellectual capital
• The real value of your intangible resources
• Recognizing the value of hidden innovation and spotting its occurrence

7. Entering into Competitive Battle – the Dynamics of Rivalry, the Uniqueness of You

• Recognizing, developing, capturing, transforming, avoiding and out – manoeuvring
• Your point of choosing what, where, how and when to compete.
• Building capabilities that are unique to you and hard to replicate
• Building sustainability into the innovation equation as ongoing
• Extending the turf, exploiting the situation, pushing beyond, seeking partners.

8. Building and Testing Capabilities to Perform

• Measuring capabilities through different fitness levels and scale.
• Learning to build capabilities as ‘ongoing’ and evolving for changing needs
• Re-Structuring the process for dealing with the dynamics of change
• Knowing the points of impact on performance to enable recognition and reality
• Managing innovation performance progressively across the spectrum of business need through testing and extending capability learning.
• Building from personal to team to organizational learning in measured steps
• Recognizing the role of leadership, achieving strategic alignment and working on broadening out innovation competence at different organizational levels.

9. Keeping the innovation fitness wheels turning, keeping your eyes on the road

• Resolution of conflicting goals, control and structure
• Dissecting conflicting positions, resolving impasse
• Knowing the limits of human engagement
• Goals, controls and measurements can dominate and strangle
• Keeping the measurements simple and clear
• Managing innovation as a critical strategic resource
• Merging the results into a greater alignment to Strategy and Approaches

The end result is looking to generate your fitness landscape

As you can see this is applying a very comprehensive approach, a fairly ‘intensive’ one.  This might alter individually after some clear piloting, learning and experimentation undertaken.  Building innovation capabilities takes time; they are complex, highly structured and multi-dimensional. Any structured approach to tackling innovation takes time and considerable commitment.

Looking for a clear end result

Any learning involves sensing, seizing and then transforming. We are searching for what makes up the present system and what needs to be part of the future to create a ‘best’ innovation capability environment that is sustaining into the longer-term. Those that can be continually ‘orchestrated’ and constantly adapted to meet the strategic need.

We are striving towards a true ‘innovation coherency premium’ in design, knowing what makes up your core dynamic components. The outcomes are to know where to invest, what to dampen down and what aspects can evolve naturally and be ‘taken along’ as you focus upon the ones that are more dynamic and relevant to your innovation needs.

No journey is without pitfalls.

Finding the dynamic capabilities of innovation that ‘fit’ with the strategic needs of each organization will be different based on their own respective challenges and position. We need to stop simply copying others and create our own ‘dynamics’ to strengthen our own unique advantage points for sustaining our future. Do you want to become innovation fit?

The post Nine steps leading to understanding your dynamic innovation capabilities first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Innovation capability building is my 100% focus from my work point of view.

I’m comfortable in much of the understanding of what makes up innovation, totally restless in so much more that is out there to explore and work through – I believe we need to significantly improve potential solutions, through experimentation and prototyping until they become recognized as relevant and applicable and become deeply embedded within our organizations as the accepted approach to innovation design and management.

Investigating, researching and reading all required a significant amount of time, all alongside needing to practice innovation, working to clients’ needs or pushing for their attention to changes taking place within the field of innovation management and what they needed to do about it.

Dynamic capability applied to innovation keeps gaining my increased attention

One area that caught my attention many years back, was the notion of “dynamic capability”, the organizations capacity to change its operation and adapt them to the environmental requirements in systematic and fruitful ways. Academic papers by Teece, Pisano and Shuen, by Eisenhardt and Martin and finally for me, Zollo and Winter, all fueled my thinking at that time.

Winter suggested that organization change happens in two ways; the first is ad-hoc problem driven in our searches or the second is through the action of “stable patterns of activity aimed at creating or changing operating routines in pursuit of enhanced organizational effectiveness” offering the initial definition of dynamic capabilities. I’m up for the second, most organizations still often practice and treat innovation in ad-hoc ways.

What are dynamic capabilities?

These are the skills, processes, routines, organizational structure and disciplines that enable firms to build, employ and orchestrate intangible assets relevant to satisfying customer needs and which cannot be replicated by competitors. Enterprises with strong dynamic capabilities are intensely entrepreneurial, they adapt around business ecosystems, and they shape them through innovation, collaboration, learning and deep involvement.

I am really hooked on this. This started me on my hardest journey that began in 2008 around my pursuit of building a way to understand what makes up innovation capability and capacities within organizations. I needed to find a way to build, to integrate and configure internal and external competencies to address rapidly changing environments.

Much as Teece, et all, had outlined some years early the notion of this, there continues to lack decent, coherent solutions. Any suggestions I researched were often a little thin on the ground, in practical application but some of the concepts had a richness about them to sustain real interest in my continued pursuit to find a practical, enduring commercial solution to managing the dynamics within innovation. So this became part of my challenge and growing interest.

Moving from intent to cognizance and then application

So I was looking for designing something that gave a sustaining competitive in innovation advantage, that was shaped by the individual organizations specific asset position and where it needed to go and develop to get it to that stated strategic goal they required. This hinged on identifying the value points where resource configurations needed advancing once the gaps could be identified.

This journey has taken me all over the place. I have studied increasingly dynamic capabilities, innovation landscapes, absorptive capacity, where open innovation fits and then increasingly in this more open environment the need for collaboration, for networking, for orchestrating innovation to deliver what is needed, into the markets advancing on existing offerings.

My often interrupted journey was partly by design but also by lacking essential parts.

Since  the 2008 and 2009 period, where I had an incredible burst of energy into this whole area, I found I had to leave it, put it to one side for eighteen months or so. Sometimes you have to stop your searches and reflect a little. Any journey you do need decent resting and reflecting periods.

In 2011 I took up this quest again, yes quest is the right word, as it has both been long and a difficult search. I designed a framework, the innovation fitness landscape model and set up a dedicated web site for managing this at innovation fitness dynamics. This has bubbled along but was not the platform I expected or able to launch in the ways I’d ideally like. Something was still missing.

In this time I’d concluded that to identify the “dynamics” needed for innovation I’d need at least two levels of evaluation – the internal one where it seemed nine descriptors gave the necessary ‘thrusts’ to find the critical internal related aspects and the external one – more as the level of ‘degree’s’ of engagement for evolving the external related need. I was happier with the internal part, not so much with the external one. I’ve completed some limited testing but by no means feeling I’m yet ready to really push out on this so a short period of digestion and thinking led to another hiatus until a few weeks ago.

So in mid 2013 I have taken up my innovation journey again, relating to innovation dynamics and fitness landscapes. There was a realization I was missing something. The innovation system I had been focusing upon was simply made up for the single organization and although I was consciously working on the external environment and recognizing their degree of importance, I was not  actually reflecting the really big changes going on in innovation today and in the near future, as I should have been. The changes taking place through more open, collaborative innovation. I was writing about it but not taking it fully into this dynamic framework of mine.

So this innovation journey continues, often in ‘fits and starts’.

The post Continuing the Innovation Journey- connecting the points first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

When we begin to want to orchestrate across external innovation networks we not only need to know ourselves extremely well, we also need to know what others can bring and what is missing. Networks are dynamic, the flow of knowledge, of capabilities and competencies all need somehow capturing. Recognizing this shift in my thinking, allowed me to pick up the baton again and begin to conduct all the different fragments and pull them together, into a different result.

I learnt also that innovation needs this growing orchestration, due to this increasing move from firm-centric to network-centric innovation. In my understanding of a orchestrator, he needs to manage the tempo, knowing where and when to cue in the different players (learning) and to inject the intensity into the performance. I was back on my journey recognizing the different passages and movements I’d been on, where all contributing into a final result. “Something” was coming together and I need to work through the new ‘score’ being played out.

We need to learn to identify, assimilate and exploit far more than ever, the value of knowing your innovation fitness, your dynamics and the terrain you wish to traverse in new innovation activity becomes even more critical. To create and to extract does clearly need to understand the what, why, where, when and how it needs to go about this.

The orchestrator needs to orchestrate.

To do this you must orchestrate the capabilities, to purposefully build what is needed to deliver the final result. I have reconfigured my thinking around what will influence the evolution leading from internal innovation capabilities to a whole ‘network’ of these. It still lies in how you purposefully build these capabilities and competencies up. Orchestration is fundamentally dynamic, full of uncertainties but the need is still to connect the parts.

The four dimensions for building capability to innovate are at the individual level, within teams, within the organization and within the dynamic set of networks needed at given times to solve innovation challenges. These capabilities need to possess mobility, appropriability, certain stability and the willingness to learn and build on the existing dynamics. Internal capabilities still need building but we also must work to identify those complementary capabilities across a fluid set of stakeholders to deliver a more complex innovation challenge.

Orchestration has for me become very important to my ongoing work on the dynamic innovation capabilities for recognizing your innovation fitness landscape and the gaps. These become even more of a challenge when different perspectives and competencies enter the mix.

We urgently need to understand the ‘dynamics of innovation’ even more. What is the local maximum, what can we work upon in transition, what we need to bring in for any future co-creation and what needs working upon within specific networks within the innovation capabilities and capacities needed to be applied.

The dynamic view of orchestrating is needed

The orchestrating of open innovation challenges is dynamic and we increasingly need to know the critical factors and their dependencies for delivering a collaborative innovation success. 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 intangible assets relevant to satisfying customer needs and which cannot be replicated by competitors, that delivers the new innovation needed through collaboration efforts.

The post Orchestration is required for dynamic Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.