Knowing your innovation ‘stock’ and ‘capital’ potential
Knowing our stock and capital for innovation
If we really want to innovate well, we need to know our ‘innovation stock’. This is where the largest part of our wealth generating capital lies and where it’s potential can be best put to use. We are today increasingly valuing the knowledge perspective far more and with this we are increasingly recognizing the importance of the intellectual capital that makes up the organization.
I, and many others, would argue that we certainly need to re-think many of the old world value delivery systems to assess organizations and make much more of a concerted effort to make innovation that renders different, unique value outcomes, that keep pushing the boundaries of strategic advantage within any business.
This post follows on from my recent one of “the Innovation Journeyman.” We do have a real journey still to travel to understand the dynamics within innovation. Here, I want to lay out a possible path that might advance us towards achieving this. This includes a fairly ‘intensive’ nine step approach outlined below.
The innovation fitness dynamics
What we do need to do is constantly evolve our innovation capabilities to perform in more dynamic and flexible ways. We need to acquire that consistent aim of achieving a more adaptable and adjusting approach to innovation in all its parts.
We need to meet the changing circumstances and challenges we are all facing to regain the real growth needed from our economies and organizations, making what we do at the same time, more sustainable. Delivering better innovation outcomes is central to this task.
Continuing the innovation journey searching for the framework to deliver the dynamics of innovation by focusing upon achieving a certain innovation fitness.
My personal innovation journey started way back in 2001 when I got ‘hooked’ on innovation and what it could deliver in its impact on a business.
I believe it is for greater engagement within the organization and increased identification through their people, with the potential for learning and improving their capabilities.
Progressively I learnt about innovation, studied it as part of my Master’s degree and began to practice the parts others were prepared to pay me for, either to listen to, or offer advice.
This innovation journey took on a shape that eventually became 100% of my focus within my advisory practices at Agility Innovation Specialists and Hoca Consulting by systematically building my understanding of innovation and providing this knowledge to others through advisory, coaching, writing and mentoring services.
It still is a long continuous journey twelve plus years later.
I’m constantly learning, reading, absorbing and interpreting what I understand and then attempting to provide my thoughts to others, those willing to listen!
I’m comfortable in much, totally restless in so much more out there to explore and work through, so as to achieve potential solutions, through experimentation and prototyping until they become recognized as relevant and applicable.
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 gained my increased attention
My real area of dedicated focus and wish to achieve, is in supporting organizations, teams or even the individual, to really build their integrated capability and capacity to innovate as a connected framework.
The critical design is of three mutually supporting capability building platforms do need to be put into place.
Within an organizational setting, you need to have in place three supporting capability building platforms; organizational supporting, knowledge and competency gathering, and a clear innovation process to channel new capacity through as final products or new services. All three need to be in place and integrated.
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 unique innovation capability framework to grow from.
I wrote in an earlier blog called “the new extended innovation funnel” (http://bit.ly/hQTEJz) my reasoning for thinking differently from our traditional view of how the innovation funnel should look like. I feel it should look more like this.
Extended Innovation Funnel – are we really listening?
The ‘classic’ innovation funnel talked about is wrong for todays job!
Walking that narrow innovation pathway needs some rethinking.
The narrow innovation pathway
“Innovation is the pathway to travel and seek out our future”
Today there is as much of a gap between the aspiration to innovate and the ability to deliver on this.
We still continue to ignore the constant suggestion that innovation should be systematic so the organization can provide some degree of reliability to innovate in a continuous fashion.
We often allow the concept of ‘holistic’ to simply float over us and ignore the intimate connection between strategic thinking, innovation and their alignment. It is still sad we seem not to go beyond a certain point in our innovation thinking, it continues along a narrow path of limited understanding. Will it ever change?
I appreciate the statement, I think made by John Kao: “Strategy is useless without innovation, innovation is directionless without strategy”. Innovation can be a strategy catalyst but is it still? I really do believe we need a new sense of the scale and scope of innovation; we do need to get a firmer grip on its complexities.
