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:
Mapping out your innovation terrain
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 applythe appropriate resources to navigate the terrain.
The greater fitness you achieve equates to more value creation potential. The ability to inter‐couple landscape entities, to constantly combine the different capabilities in different often unique ways and exploit…
The Nine Steps needed for developing an understanding of your innovation capabilities to make them more dynamic.
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?
The steps in building innovation capability
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.
I had not recognized the incredible power of “orchestration” needed in innovation as much as I should have done. Of course it was there, actually all around us, going on all the time but it was not as ‘loud and clear’ in my thinking as it should have been. The blind spot had been my focus on pursuing this continual need to organize around innovation within an organization. Although this is as essential today there has been continued and rapid shifts taking place outside the walls and I was not capturing the dynamics of this well enough .
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.
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
I do so enjoy doing a wordle (www.wordle.net), they make you feel a whole lot clearer on what and where any focus might be, or has been, from a perspective of my business and how it is evolving in content and areas of value for any innovative offering to clients.
Towards the end of a calendar year I like to always look back and reflect, to see where my innovation activities have headed. Did they add value, did they move innovation and my thinking forward? I think initially exploring these within a wordle does help make the critical focal points stand out.
So here are mine that reflect where I am in what I am exploring and looking to increasingly work with clients upon. I thought I’d share the evolution of how this is evolving, I hope positively for all concerned.
