For me, the bedrock of innovation is built upon competencies, capabilities, and capacities and all these involve people as well as technology. They go hand in hand in our connected world.

Building these is the core of my own innovation offering in consulting, in advising, mentoring and coaching. My work constantly “maps” back to this essential three “C” of competencies, capabilities, and capacities.

Let me offer some thoughts that build around a framework I work through.

I often break my explanations down on this building core competency into eight parts.

We have two levels to it. The first (or higher level) is the need for a 1) Unifying framework, 2) to gain alignment and this needs two essential aspects to be well-clarified. We need to establish 3) a working blueprint and a clear understanding of 4) the business focus orientation for innovation to reside in.

The outcomes of this top-tier framing then we can begin to construct the underlying level of 5) well-designed competencies that need to be pursued, we need to move the organization or the innovation activities into ones that are seeking out this constant alignment and this needs building 6) critical behaviours, a seeking out of 7) motivators and finally, 8) the dependencies we must have to map back and advance our core and build our innovation competencies upon.

Let me explain these a little more, they tie together.

• The Unifying framework needed. Competencies that are going to be built need to fit the core design and aspirations of the organization. These are strategically defined and combine organizational goals and individuals development. Knowing the vision, direction and intent of the organization will enable innovation to be designed top work with these. I believe there are different innovation types as pathways to pursue. A dedicated site has been put together to understand the potentially different innovation types (in collaboration with  Jeffrey Phillips over at Ovo Innovation).It can be found at http://cirf.pbworks.com and explores the necessary business architecture, provides a detailed innovation reference framework and examines the different innovation types through a unique lens. Each innovation lens builds upon different capabilities and competencies needed. We also do need a common language of success and innovation’s contribution to this and again in a collaboration with Ovo, we designed the Innovation Executive Work Mat (initial whitepaper) as the overarching need to have in place. The whole point of both of these thinking through positions was to raise the bar of understanding around ‘different’ innovation, create this better fit and strive towards this alignment strategically and operationally. The net effect is it does prompt a greater desire, clarity of purpose, identification, and fit, required at the senior management level and in general for innovation management construction.

• Gaining Alignment. Alignment is one of the hardest tasks, especially in large organizations. There is the need to address the corporate alignment, the granularity that always occurs in specific goals and tasks. Having a clear, well- articulated strategic innovation document, one of the outcomes of working through the Executive Work Mat frame you can address the multiple points of identification. You can determine the competencies required of everyone for innovation to be more within the core of the organization as well as you can address those that are specific. The approaches taken to alignment must continue to map back to 1) the business strategy, 2) vision and missions, 3) the innovation needs and 4) the pathway development that is taken to achieve this alignment.

• The Working Blueprint. My approach to blueprints might be different to others. It needs to have established the key dependency decisions, the honest assessment of the key aspects in the likelihood of success by determining the milestones to identify and move towards, the critical spotting of the gaps in critical competencies that are present today. I have built and continue to develop my thinking here through a dedicated website for what I call the innovation fitness dynamics, taking a structured approach to the development. This is a journey towards innovation fitness; it is dynamic and has nine stages to work through. This is a long journey of exploration and experimenting. This approach lays out a process to manage the development of the capabilities and competencies needed. The blueprint is staged and planned, dependent on the overarching strategic approach to innovation

• The Business Focus Orientation. I look at four aspects here a) is it competitive b) Is it well-structured and designed c) Is it highly entrepreneurial in its design and execution and finally, d) Is it built on a collaborative basis
  • Competitive needs to think through the action orientation, the business acumen that is needed, the customer engagement intent and the result focus outcomes expected.
  • The well-structured part is the decision-making process, the level of (dedicated) project management, how much is self-managed in learning, what level of supervisory skills and the design of a talent management approach.
  • The entrepreneurial skill set is how much agility, flexibility, change, risk taking, new knowledge, and expertise is gained and then applied to solutions pursued, that builds confidence.
  • Then in the collaborative part it is the levels of collaborations achieved, in the manner of communication and relationship building, the ability to manage conflict management, the development leadership applied and the interpersonal effectiveness by leading and influencing others in the pursuit of innovation solutions.

Then we set about a detailed structuring of what constitutes the core competencies

5. The Well-designed competencies that emerge due to the working through the above. These can then be described by knowing the knowledge and skills required. By building these to reflect novel and complex situations and innovation is often most certainly both you can begin to build a “sticky” competence set that will remain relevant even if content knowledge changes as it continues to align to the above. The importance of clarity in performance levels, expectations and the understanding of a constant improving metric build this competency framing up. The whole ethos is to seek out deeper learning experiences and having exposure on knowing where to apply these in meeting different challenges and opportunities. The ongoing dialogue builds from this dynamic learning approach to understanding how performance can become better by practice and learning objective. I very much like to use the absorptive capacity framework for this knowledge learning journey.

5. Critical behaviors. It is seeking and identifying those positive behaviors that advance innovation. These need to be at individual, team and organization levels. Again it is a learning journey, of experimenting, clarifying and then embedding ones that work. These need to be recognized as constantly fluid, adaptive and agile. Constantly asking what enhances perform at each of the three levels, what gives impact and movement and can be measured, adopted, seen and valued by others.

5. Seeking out the motivators. Innovation is tough as much of it remains unclear, in plain sight and needs to be realized. The whole motivation effect works on being observable, measurable and clear. The constant revisiting ‘intent and purpose’ gives identification, we need to shift to ultimate outcomes. Basic motivations rise as identification with an achievement orientation, exploring the prevailing attitudes, values and self-concepts become the well-seen framework to be judged against, where achievement orientation prevails and is recognized.

5. Finally building all the dependencies. Taking an open stance to innovation, its discovery, investigation, its progression in its different stages from concepts to prototypes, to final outcomes and commercialization requires a real ‘network effect’ of collaborators. Today we recognize that we need to have an externally focused outlook to learning, (relating to the actual world, outside-in) seeking expertise, open up to diversity and specialization as well as knowing where the leveraging points are within the internally focused needs (of our world, inside-out) of who does what, who can influence, support, decide and become more engaged and involved. Dependencies are highly dynamic and fluid. It is tapping into creativity, seeking out opinion and expertise and feeling a growing level of freedom. We need to work on the four parts here a) critical thinking b) complex problem solving, c) judgment and decision-making and d) active engagement and learning. We need to fill all the gaps

In summary.

Innovation needs to be dynamic; it cannot survive in a static environment, it needs to search out opportunities and quickly capitalize on these. The routines we build to support these dynamic environments equally need to be infused with this dynamic tendency. Asking constantly about our routines what has the potential to be far more evolutionary in nature, differentiating, critically enabling and supporting.

Innovation does need to be linked to a clear sense of purpose. The need to build the innovation capital comes from pulling together our intangible assets and most of these are learning capitals that our people, their relationships and the leveraging of the structural capitals give us the foundation for value identification, creation, and realization. Knowing how to set about the building of core competencies, building capacity and capabilities is critical to design in any innovation endeavor, or simply to thrive and grow. Setting about their design becomes critical. This provides a “snapshot” in my thinking and structuring core competencies needed in innovation designs.

So these are just my closing innovation thoughts of 2016. I wish you a highly successful innovating 2017 ahead of us all.

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The post Building the Core Competencies for Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Part three – the value is in changing, doing and exchanging

How are we going to engage more people within the innovation process? Getting people involved is getting people “doing”. We learn far more when we are doing and gaining experience yet organizations are always in seems to me consciously or unconsciously reducing the experimental part to any persons learning.

We need to reverse this and simply encourage the exploring of new skills, gaining new experiences and probing established rules to value them but also to challenge and push them. Innovation is certainly not a friend to rules, established protocols and traditions.

‘It’ looks to attract the diverse opinions, the people willing to speak up and be heard as they often have observed and feel something can be changed and ‘itch’ for the chance to explore and learn from this.

Coupling, uncoupling and recoupling in complex systems
Innovation is a complex system where the coupling, uncoupling and re-coupling of  technology, design, product, organization, art and science, to name just a few of the parts, that need to constantly engage for good worthwhile innovation to happen, is important for us to recognize.

Organizations have real difficulties with this ‘fluid need’ to allow innovation to evolve as the natural tendencies are to apply, traditional, established ways to track, to attempt to ‘file away’ something that can be related too within the experiences.

This is why encouraging enquiry, by pushing experiences you ‘form’ less and ‘allow’ more to evolve before you make the judgement. Innovation needs to be allowed to stay ‘fluid’ as long as possible before the final commercial ‘freeze’ moment when all the combinations emerge as new to the world.
We also come back to the intrinsic nature of innovation; it needs different resources, skills and knowledge experiences to come into play. It is this very diversity of opinion, if allowed to engage and explore, gives us the chances of advancing innovation, of achieving a more radical solution.

Perhaps we ‘promote’ incremental innovation far more than we realize because we don’t go out and engage in broader communities due to not having the time, the inclination or the understanding of its real value.

Equally because we are simply not encouraged to do so, hence my argument we need a clear innovation knowledge exchange structure in place working through the absorptive capacity structure.

Openness and Convergence

Besides all the well-argued aspects of open innovation that certainly includes that famous statement that “all knowledge does not reside in one place” the more we interact, cooperate and network we share knowledge.

Often the regret is the ‘brief’ is getting tighter and tighter to work from, so as to speed up discussions, the searches and ‘lock-in’ solutions the more we ignore weaker signals that are out there, hinting at even greater innovation opportunity.

We chose to push past these due to this incentive, this often ‘hard’ metric that we work strictly on the ‘brief’ unless we simply trip over something so blindingly better.

Although we are certainly evolving innovation the more we open-up we do need to build in some slack time to explore, often go with a hunch and follow our noses. We are in danger of losing this opportunity in our focused intents.

Open innovation will not yield all it can promise if we don’t allow for more open knowledge exploration that might be out of the ‘norm’ but still within the parameters of what we are wanting to achieve – innovation that offers compelling competitive advantage – and we often can’t achieve that if we remain blind to those ‘weak signals’ that knowledge exchange that is encouraged to recognize, value and assimilate.

The Dangers Lurking in Innovation

We all speak of enhancing innovation capabilities but it can be both competence-enhancing and competence-destroying. We build on “preferred” routes to enhance our existing capabilities as this is traditionally viewed as the way to become ‘competitive’.

Actually, the very opposite can and does happen. Significant breakthroughs, changes in conditions, markets or technologies leave us increasingly unprepared. More and more disruption is occurring and with this it is bringing increasing obsolescence.

We do need to acquire new skills, not ones layered on pre-conceived ideas and practices but on ones that promote new “fields of activity” we built into our thinking. We need more intensive innovation that explores at the emerging new edges of innovation management.

A great example of new fields of activity is MIX

A real valuable example of this is the work taking place within the Management Innovation  eXchange (MIX) as an open innovation project aimed at reinventing management for the 21st century. The premise: “while “modern” management is one of humankind’s most important inventions, it is now a mature technology that must be reinvented for a new age”.

This is a meeting place where The MIX is designed for all those who are frustrated by the limits of our legacy management practices. It’s for all the inspired thinkers and radical doers who believe we can — and must — find alternatives to the bureaucratic and dis-empowering management practices that still rule most organizations.

Principles of the MIX – Everyone Wins When Everyone Shares

“The MIX represents a pioneering attempt to use the open innovation model to help accelerate the evolution of a critical social technology — its management. Rather than struggling in isolation to reinvent the processes and practices of management, MIX members can leverage the expertise and insights of a global community of like-minded innovators.

The success of the MIX hinges on the willingness of its members to share their ideas and experiences, which depends in turn on a belief that more can be gained by sharing than by hoarding. Truth is, there’s a lot more management innovation going on in the world at large than in any particular organization.

Thus the MIX gives every progressive management innovator the chance to share a little and learn a lot”.

Certainly learning favours the brave
We certainly need to educate across innovation more than ever. It needs not just greater recognition of its vital parts, it needs to be recognized as a value enhancing and organizational life-changing event we need to move towards increasingly. Innovation needs to be recognized as a clear discipline, a new expertise that is as powerful as Marketing became some decades ago.

The more we embrace change, recognize innovation demands more of our time, the more we seek out knowledge that ‘feeds’ innovation and we ‘push’ for learning far more about its impact and its complex parts, the greater chance we have of thriving in a challenging world.

The expectation ‘bar’ needs to be raised and those practising within innovation, dealing in some of its parts do need to raise their game. Learning and Education always should start at home.

The more we learn, have open interactions and form linkages the more we will be ready to advance innovation into what it must become, innovation management, recognized as a discipline and highly valued for what it contributes in wealth and growth potential.

We need to find the determination to underpin the capacity for innovation, lying within us all, and that comes from knowledge and education through collaborative learning. So what is your capacity for innovation really like?

The post Reducing confusion, promoting diffusion for new knowledge in innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Part one –  an opener to innovation change

How do we advance the learning needed for innovation? In my last article I wrote about the need to prepare ourselves for some forthcoming standards for innovation.

In a number of  earlier articles, I have also written on a range of contributing factors that will advance innovation in its learning and adoption. In this series I want to go deeper – an emerging treaty for innovation advancement.

I have to be clear here, I am becoming increasingly frustrated by the seemingly lack of advancement in our understanding of innovation. Today we have a real challenge, all of us, in boosting our capacity for innovation.

We need to achieve this ‘boost’ as the outcomes we can gain and are required are both economic and social in the potential value. We need to move beyond the existing and tackle the blockages to the preferred, when it comes to innovation achievements.

We face many challenges within a highly competitive world
As we seek out fresh opportunities, locally and globally, we are becoming increasingly challenged. The world is highly competitive.

The key driver to meet these ‘twin’ challenges is innovation, not just for the short-term results businesses are so obsessed about but the critically important need to simply find the pathway to sustainable development through re-occurring innovation activities.
Sadly today we still marginalized innovation, we rely on incremental activities to pull us through the short-term and seemingly just keep putting off the longer-term.

Much of management within organizations is mortgaging the future for today’s immediate gains. I loved this thought, although it may not contain much original thinking but it does offer what I felt reflects on this point: “we are simply kicking the innovation can down the road.”  T

his needs desperately changing for these economic and social reasons that are increasingly looming down that same road. Innovation needs to be better understood in what constitutes it and all the different ways it can be applied.

We do need to understanding it better for its significant contribution potential to what we need to solve as social and economic problems.

 The role of education and learning for innovation
The role of people within innovation can never be overstated. They make it happen, everything else is their enablers.

We do need to understand what makes innovation truly work through increasing the comprehension of “combining” its many myriad parts. Innovation skills need an innovation friendly environment and we need to reform much of our existing approaches to innovation as practiced today.

Actually we need to really speed up our reforms and we need to achieve a clear consensus of what better frameworks and activities can deliver this. Of course I would offer a shameless plug of the Executive Innovation Work Mat to be part of this, why not?

I do believe it is part of the emerging solution. In my opinion the work mat helps educate, frame and to learn from in it’s combining the critical aspects, so as to improve on our existing performance and build from this.

It is increasing recognized we are all in need to follow the lifelong learning track, as organizations are increasingly insisting on increasing human performance yet constantly reducing the ‘bodies’ to assist in this.

We need to keep relevant or we also become caught up in this marginalization if we don’t and have a poorer potential in our future.

Technology can’t stand alone, it needs actively working.

Organizations are presently mistaking the promise of technology alone and this will not work; it needs people, their knowledge and experiences to apply the technology.

Far too often we are not finding the time as increasing complexity is layered onto dwindling human resources. We are adding more pressure into the system by taking out the very solution we need to keep in place and utilize far more, that is our people.

We are pushed to keep up and to stay relevant; we have to bury often our personal grievances because if we surface them, then we might get singled out in the next round of often mindless people cuts.

We do need to reverse this board room mentality and cutting out the diversity of opinion that should be valued not thrown away. We need to make our performance potential to be stretched even more, encouraging and sustaining these different opinions.

We must find ways to break into this ‘boom or bust’ mentality in board rooms by reducing the very friction that stimulates greater innovation thinking.

So how can we achieve this? Openness, trust, partnership, valuing diversity is ones that readily spring to mind here. But more importantly we need to build an innovation road-map to scope out the innovation landscape and the dynamics.

Building real education into an innovation road-map

One place to start is to design a more comprehensive road-map of innovation made up of its integral parts. The more innovation is seen and the people that enacted this are recognized, not buried in plain sight, the more it will be valued.

The more we see ‘it’ and what it contributes the more people become essential to their place within this mutual value proposition we need between the organization and its employees. The overarching plank of offering education on innovation is the real ‘glue’ as this is where the value of knowledge is central, in my view, to the way forward.

Knowledge, innovation knowledge, is made up of an awful lot of different things and this is where the real education comes in, front and center in developing new practices, in training, in educating, in translating this knowledge into lasting value.

The more people are valued, the more they become ‘sticky’ and the more they use their knowledge, then it becomes mutually re-enforcing as their organizations grow to appreciate their worth. We need a new social contract between organizations and the people they employ and that should be on mutual appreciation of the ability to translate knowledge into new value-generating outcomes together.

The more we identify the educational parts, the more we appreciate innovations complexity but then we can equally see the rich potential in the rewards that become achievable in taking this new route. Education leads, it provides the appropriate focus and this we can derive the training and knowledge to be applied, so we can improve results and innovation outcomes.

Knowledge Exchanging is our way forward.

Organizations need to move well beyond their rather lazy reliance on best practice comparison as they actually need to explore emerging practices far more but that takes many into a different realm, the realm of increasing uncertainties, and most people and organizations are not trained for this.

They anticipate risk by reducing all the variables within risk and play safe with just being incremental. Is that wrong? No, while we have our reward systems geared to short-term performance, while we measure leadership success the way we presently do, while the shareholder just expects consistent dividends as their part of the equation, and is quickly mobilized to force change if it does not meet this immediate aim we head down the wrong path.

We are not sustaining, we are destroying. We need to focus on competence-enhancing not competence-destroying. To know the differences we need educating on recognizing what makes up the difference.

I can’t change our prevailing system but I can point to alternatives and suggest we have other options, pursued by the few, which are more visionary and brave and often disrupting the accepted.

We need to start by reducing ambiguity.

One real key for the few seems to be the ability to reduce ambiguity, in the concepts, in their visions, in their focus. This reducing of ambiguity improves the chances of a successful outcome that everyone involved can understand the challenges, relate to the possibilities and constantly tracking back to this vision to obtain and advance the evidence of its possibilities and potential with a meaningful contribution. They do this mostly through knowledge exchange.

I’ll discuss this and what this means in the next article, then we will delve deeper into how knowledge is ‘made up’ and can be delivered to achieve a greater openness, convergence and capacity for innovation to take hold and thrive through its mutual dependencies.

I’ll cover the ‘coupling’ within the innovation system, convergence and the dangers lurking in innovation. I’ll delve even further into where absorptive capacity builds our knowledge capacity and a pathway to apply fresh learning so we can all innovate better.

Finally I’ll explore further on how we need to recognize the layers within innovation that do need to shear against each other to generate positive innovation tension and ways to find the space to allow innovation to grow differently through an innovation learning process.

The post What is your capacity for innovation really like? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.