capabilities for innovation - Innovation Thinking and Resources

Building Differentiating Capabilities for Innovation

By @paul4innovating February 9, 2017Building Innovation Capability, Polymers1 Comment

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

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

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

Drawing out the different voices within the three horizon methodology for Innovation

By @paul4innovating April 4, 2015Molecules6 Comments

We so often struggle to articulate our innovation activity and then can’t seemingly project our plans into the future in consistent and coherent ways. We often lack the framing necessary.
If this rings true of the innovation activity in your organization, then it is in danger of being seen as isolated, one-off events, that fail to link to your organizational strategy. Furthermore you’ll be missing out, or not capitalizing on emerging trends and insights where fresh growth opportunities reside.
I so often come back to the messages we need to learn, which centers around the three horizon methodology.
I just wish this framework would be adopted far more within organizations. wanting to build a sustaining dialogue around innovation, it can be such a powerful enabler.

Greater fitness in innovation offers more value creation potential

By @paul4innovating January 26, 2014Capabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Impact & Scale, Outcomes & Expectancies

The greater fitness you achieve equates to more value creation potential.

Achieving more dynamic innovation fitness

The ability to inter‐couple landscape entities, to constantly combine the different capabilities in different often unique ways and exploit individual interactions alters your dynamics to innovate and does improve repeatable cycle times from this constant recreation potential.

The key is to know what these capability points are – by dynamic linking those that are important and ignoring those that are not.

Traversing different horizons for transformational innovation

By @paul4innovating June 7, 2013Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Fresh thinking, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Leading innovation, Polymers, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Irrespective of the organization, we all struggle with transformational innovation. So often we are simply comfortable in our ‘business as usual’. We gear performance to the short-term, we put the emphasis on the current fiscal year, and we support the core business in numerous ways, usually with lots and lots of incremental innovation, so the results are realizable in this year.

We are sometimes comfortable or confident enough to move into adjacent areas, to expand and feed off the core but these are less than transformational in most cases. This space is the one we are the most comfortable to work within, this is the horizon one of the three horizon model approach outlined to manage innovation across a more balanced portfolio of investment.

In summary, the three horizon model for innovation is actually a reasonably simple idea: with Horizon One (h1) being the current business focus, Horizon Two (h2) being more the related emerging business opportunities and Horizon Three (h3) being those that are moving towards a completely new business that can have the potential to disrupt the existing one.

The complexity lies underneath this simple idea, you need to manage these different horizons with completely different mindsets. You need clear well-structured ways to extract the real return from managing a comprehensive innovation portfolio based on knowledge, experience, intelligence but exploring plenty of the unknowns about the future and openness to get you there, as ready as you can be . Its necessary today.

The seeds of destruction lie in horizon one

Mapping innovation across the three horizons

By @paul4innovating February 18, 2013Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, gaining innovation momentum, innovation execution delivery, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

One of my most exciting areas within my innovation activities is applying the three horizon methodology, for working through the ‘appropriate’ lenses for different innovations and their future management.

Let me outline the rationale for adopting this within your organization.

Clarifying our options requires multiple thinking horizons
For me, the three horizons have great value to map different thinking and possible innovation options over changing horizons.

You can frame innovation in alternative ways by using this approach. Innovation has multiple evolution points and working with this framework allows you to significantly improve innovations contribution.

It goes well beyond the present value of ‘just’ fitting your existing innovation portfolio and directional management into a one dimensional, viewed in the present, framework.

You can see opportunities completely differently beyond the existing mindset and activities, it takes innovation from tactical to strategic, to foresight in your evaluations.

Innovation fitness dynamics – to engage with and recognize the need to change.

By @paul4innovating February 22, 2012Capabilities and Capacities, Exploratory Walks & Needs, Outcomes & Expectancies, The Big Challenges2 Comments

Working through the innovation fitness lense — Working through the innovation fitness lens

There is a continuing need is to build the management of innovation into a clear organizational capability, where innovation becomes a continuous effective innovation process.

To this end I have produced a conceptual model of what constitutes the ‘make up’ for providing an ongoing innovation performance engine- the innovation fitness landscape and the dynamics– that determine the appropriate capabilities and capacities available & required. I felt it needs a dedicated website to be the ‘go to’ source of reference. It is a work-in-progress so please recognize this when you visit it here: http://bit.ly/wX5q8R.

Understanding Absorptive Capacity

By @paul4innovating February 20, 2012Absorptive Capacity, System Solution models6 Comments

Understanding Absorptive Capacity and how it works

“Absorptive capacity” is a term introduced through some academic research by Cohen & Levinthal, back in 1990 to describe an organizations “ability to recognize the value of new, external information (knowledge), assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends”. Since then there has been significant academic contributions for exploring and validating this, in order to improve innovation performance and competitive advantage, yet it is still not well integrated into our innovation process. Why is that?

What we do need is to do is improve our HR management and network systems to build a more efficient transfer of knowledge throughout the organization so as to acquire and leverage new knowledge . This is part of applying the principles of absorptive capacity as we increasingly use more networks, external partners and collaborate with others we are accessing wider skills, inputs and competencies. We need to invest and learn what this does provide, to aid the innovation process. The theory goes that the more we understand, the more the innovative behavior and capability does goes up in potential and the more we have available a richer innovation choice .

The Model of Absorptive Capacity explores potential and realized knowledge.

The Moving Space Required for Innovation

By @paul4innovating February 16, 2012Dynamic capabilities, Motley & Sundries, System Solution models

The moving space for innovation is to allow everyone to participate in being involved and wanting to get ‘fit.’ To do this you have to be opened up to a number of “possible paths” to allow it to flow and take hold. There is the need to explore multiple ways to learn and find the right pathway. This needs a dynamic social fabric to allow it to flow, it needs organizational engagement through active experimentation.

Previously I had discussed the difficulty of setting rules for innovation. What is required is a looser approach to mutual adaption and mutual adjustment. This arises from working through the same rules and resources to access, integrate, expand and recombine knowledge as part of everyday daily jobs. The understanding of absorptive capacity helps

Possible a starting point is through three simple rules and resources I came across but can’t find the reference to at present, regretfully but these are powerful in their intent and engagement:

Mapping out a rugged innovation terrain

By @paul4innovating February 16, 2012Fitness Landscaping Regimes, Mapping & Rugged Terrains

When you climb mountains, the fitter you are the better you climb. Equally the higher one wants to climb (innovation ambition), the harder it becomes to climb to those new levels. Our ability to climb required two clear points of understanding.

Firstly what we are trying to achieve so we get a rough idea of what we want to achieve, in strategic objective, in our innovation goals and in aligning them. Secondly we require knowledge, a clear working knowledge of how innovation can work for us.

We learn by exploring, the more peaks we cover we improve our knowledge and experience. We build our knowledge landscape. The more we understand each other, the more we can collectively climb and scale our innovation fitness. The more we learn and scale the more we can explore sub peaks on smaller, experimental levels, all contributing to our growing knowledge and fitness to innovate.

Exploring the rugged terrain early helps.

Finding time for dynamics within the capacity to innovate

By @paul4innovating February 15, 2012Capabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities

Do we know what the dependencies and complementaries for building and sustaining innovation success are? How do you sustain innovation, is it more through the structuring of everyday work, by creating a particular set of social rules and resources that foster specific routines? Really, that does seem to me as sounding a little too easy, or we all would have got to this point but we haven’t,when it comes to managing innovation. Innovation seems to conflict with everyday work.

The reality is we can’t ‘create’ rules or specific routines when it comes to our need to constantly innovate, there is a host of constantly changing variables, risks and conflicts that need constant adaptation to those specific circumstances, yet we can learn more on the underlying principles and approaches. So how do we manage this in everyday work, inside organizations hell bent on managing efficiently. Certainly I buy the argument that Innovation should become part of everyone’s job on a daily basis so they have the space and potential to work on it constantly but what does this require? This is part of our journey within seeking innovation fitness through its dynamics.

Here we begin….