cascading effect on innovation - Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence

Innovation has a hard job to align

@paul4innovating — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 10:01:32 +0000

We need to recognize that innovation is one of the hardest things to align to strategy. It’s inherently messy, fairly unpredictable and its team-orientated approach sometimes cuts across borders, challenges different established positions and seemingly conflicting priorities.

It often challenges the status quo and can on certain occasions, potentially challenge the stated strategic goals as those ‘disruptive forces’ have not been addressed radically enough. Innovation often “asks” difficult questions of ourselves.

We keep asking a lot of innovators but consistently restrain them or starve them of essential resources, at the critical times they need them. We seem to get in the way of blocking innovation so it can’t be seen to align with the goals or vision of the organization.

We keep extorting innovators to raise their game, constantly trying to shape their work so it can fit. We are constantly encouraging innovators to abandon their personal judgments, open themselves up to different possibilities to try and make it “fit” with what we have got or already invested into.

We ask innovators to keep resolute and keep trying, keep pushing the boundaries, challenging and sometimes disrupting the established practices and processes, organizations like to keep in place but this is a very ‘uneasy’ and needs courage, belief but most of all alignment. Innovators need to feel confident they are fully supported and encouraged. They need empowering.

The innovator is constantly dealing with ambiguity, managing a far more dynamic process of knowledge learning and investigating. Often this is in direct conflict or tension with the majority of the organizations need to extract the most efficiencies and effectiveness out of the established systems and processes.

Strategic design often does not single out innovation as different, it expects it to comply. It is this lack of recognition that causes much of the misalignment, as it does not conform to the norm.

Yet strategy and innovation have much in common. They are both dealing with uncertainties, attempting to quantify uncertainties and unknowns, working towards a future state that advances the business by identifying and capturing new opportunities.

This is where cascading helps with alignment- consider a model

To achieve alignment, a cascade of better choices is needed that keeps mapping back to innovation activities and strategic need.

This calls for the need for a choice-cascade model where understanding flows through aligned cascading choices. Its aim is to empower firstly, by promoting and encouraging different levels of sound or best judgment, to enable individual choices, so as to allow for a ‘choice-maker’ to push this back upstream. Roger Martin and Hilary Austen have suggested “the art of integrative thinking”.

Choice options cascade down from the higher-order choices. These should set the context for and constrain (help in defining) lower-order choices.

Choices become inter-related and need to fit context and constraints from this higher-level. If there is difficulty in the fit, then the higher order needs urgently revisiting, hence the cascading effect is a constant, dynamic two-way flow.

Today, if we recognize change is a constant, flowing and rapidly changing part of how we do business, by having in place this choice cascading model you can unfreeze part of a strategy that is not ‘aligning’ with a changing world. It makes the decision-making process more dynamic and allows for greater contribution to strategic choices and the innovation process can equally respond and align on a far quicker, adaptive path.

Choice-cascade needs structure and operating principles

Choice makers within this model need to be explicit in the why:

Explain the choice that has been made and the explicit rationale behind it
Explicitly identify the next downstream choice to make it a joint venture
Assist in making the downstream choice happen explicitly
Commit to revisiting and modifying the choice based on explicit downstream feedback

To move towards choices that can outline desired outcomes and describe ways and means to achieve them allows for this alignment and flow of understanding.

A cascade must move in both directions

Water flows down but it is the ‘pushing back’ provides this feedback cascade, where the real fate of change and realization resides is in recognition and ongoing dialogues. To cascade back, clarity or questioning needs a mechanism or process to return to the top. You gain alignment through this method of cascading both up and down organizations in deliberate ways. We are seeking this alignment constantly, it is the lightning rod that transmits the energy to gain fusion.

To encourage alignment, they need to be explicitly linked to key desired behaviors, determined by the needs of the individual organization. Alignment needs to equally map back to a high consistency in core values expected in practicing, as important. I would suggest a good innovation governance design significantly helps this. This is where building the innovation culture, the environment it works within and the climate that is encouraged prompts the dialogue, conversation, and engagement.

Underpinning this alignment within the Cascade’s design and identification, you equally build a ‘belief’ audit. Its aim is to uncover where alignment is achieved, misunderstood and equally highlights where it needs a better bridging mechanism and most importantly, where there is critical misalignment to be addressed at a higher level. This belief audit strengthens the choice-cascade model as it opens up the dialogue surrounding innovation and its strategic (or operational only) alignment.

How can innovation get squared away with strategy?

As I mentioned earlier it is getting innovation into this ‘choice mentality’ on where to play and what seems to be the real wins by providing as much understanding of the judgment of why it contributes to the strategic goals. You align it or ‘flag’ it. To get innovation to align you need to discuss a whole array of gaps. It needs dialogues, engagement and a clear, cohesive set of ‘shared’ objectives of what innovation can make a contribution and deliver a difference.

Clearly, if you lack this deep understanding of how the organization’s strategy was brought together, the thinking behind it, then innovation will often fall short in delivery, as it can’t have enough of the understanding to be aligned. Making hard choices is tied to aspirations of knowing where you want to place your bets, to win.

Often it is within the strategies lies the potential new spaces to play. Strategy informs innovation. It becomes the catalyst of where-to-play and how-to-win and with this, you are giving innovators a better chance to deliver back concepts for those hard choices to be made, designed around innovate concepts that align and feeds the strategic design with winning designs

Having a cascading model in place allows that essential ‘flow’ that connects innovation to strategy but more importantly becomes the connecting point for all within the organization to identify with and…..align too.

Contact me if you would like to learn more.

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The Essential Connection Between Strategy and Innovation

@paul4innovating — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 12:19:28 +0000

Most organizations are seeking solutions to the necessary connections between Strategy and Innovation. The connection between the two are often broken.

Often it is within the strategies that should be outlined, lies the potential new spaces to play for innovation’s design. Yet how often do we fail to connect the innovation’s we design and execute specifically aligned to the strategic need?

We somehow seem to stay locked in the ‘here and now’ constantly repeating and refining the known and established within our domain of responsibility. Is this because innovation is not at the core of the business as it should be? Often we are inherently resisting to exploring change as it becomes risky and far more demanding. A good strategy, well outlined should encourage innovation and gain engagement but it can equally determine how we break down our imposed boundaries by its strategic intent, to encourage exploring and extending on what we know into the what we need to know. Strategic intent informs innovation.

If you have a clear strategic understanding of the needs of the business you are getting more of the understanding of where-to-play and how-to-win in your innovation activities and market investment. It is making these strategic connections that is giving innovators a better chance to deliver back concepts that offer alignment to this strategic need. Investing in this understanding and alignment should never be understated. The time invested, allows for the innovation investments to do their part in supporting the business and feeding it with the growth options required, or highlighting where the possible gaps might be, for additional investment or M&A activity, to accelerate this and bring-in fresh innovating momentum.

We need to close down the issue that Innovation is full of open interpretation by purposeful design

How often have we heard “innovation is important for our future success” but when this is probed deeper there is a huge dissatisfaction on its performance or contribution at all levels within organizations, why is that? Where does the problem lie? I am sure we all have multiple suggestions, some perhaps radical in the extreme but most are confirming this growing frustration with innovation’s performance yet not fully pointing to the underlying cause. This suggests that there are multiple failure points within the management of innovation.

One absolute critical one that needs resolution is achieving alignment and engagement of innovation understanding throughout the organization. It is one of the biggest challenges to resolve, it takes hard coordinating work to sort out of numerous amount of problems that need rectifying.

Frustrations abound up and down the Organization.

Clearly one critical part of this present frustration is a seemingly lack of alignment between the organizations strategic goals and its mission and how innovation is expected to contribute, so as to fuel the growth and deliver many of the essential parts of the strategic need. Often it is left far too open or unclear for individual interpretation. It is often when we have uncertainly, opportunism steps in and attempts to fill the space. Innovation needs a much stronger alignment to strategy, they need connecting far better. One suggestion here is the adoption of the choice cascade model, discussed later as part of the suggested solution.

One of the basic troubles increasingly today is we are not in the world of stable markets, we are seeing increasing competitive intensity and challenges to market definitions that are radically altering how we proceed. Technology has become both the enabler and the disruptor to this. We are ‘reacting’ far more in knee-jerk ways to resolve a sudden crisis and look increasingly towards fast innovation solutions to fill the gap. Some of these solutions create ‘knock.-on’ effects and create a mismatch between solving an interim problem and causing disruption to the longer-term direction. They also can distract resources away from more critical solutions to solve underlying growth issues within the organization.

This is why I also highly recommend the three horizon framework as part of this discipline of managing the ‘needs of today’ with the strategy of having a thoughtful portfolio of options for the future that requires this different horizon thinking.

Of course much in the future has no boundaries we can determine and evaluate against and this gives high levels of uncertainty but it can be reduced, by being driven by a clearer clarity of purpose or intent. It is this ‘clarity of purpose’ that innovation needs to ‘track, mirror and explore’. If we keep ‘reacting’ constantly to the present we might never arrive at the future.

The strategic purpose ‘informs’ and I think we all have this growing recognition that today’s business model will not remain viable for long periods, as we operate increasingly in fluid and volitile conditions, that require constant adjustment and response. This means our innovation resources must align far more to the direction seen or looks reasonably plausible and ‘shape and form’ around this. Foresight should be governed by beliefs about the future and innovation should be driven in this direction but always with a word of caution, that we equally have to always recognize that the future is a moving target. It is beholden on innovation to explore and exploit this, to pursue an evolutionary path towards understanding and validation.

Taking action in designing your innovation alignment

“Strategy informs”. Knowing where to place your innovation thinking becomes critical; it is knowing where the leadership places its importance, its ‘bets to win’. This might be in having the need for a richer user engagement experience, a more robust futurist product portfolio to test, learn and explore potential options. It can be where it plans to invest it’s technology options to leverage knowledge.

We have to keep asking those essential questions that link strategy and innovation in understanding. It becomes important to know if the growth is going to come through acquisition of capabilities and competencies that fill critical gaps. What are those ‘perceived’ gaps? Can they be filled by shifting the innovation competencies, capabilities or capacities? If you are not ‘informed’ by strategy, you are simply ‘second guessing’ and here is where alignment breaks down by not having this understanding. Often the designers of strategy omit the essential details of “how we believe we will get there” and what are the primary resource levers to commit into this.

You need to know what type of company ‘we are’ today and does it need to change: are you integrators, leader, laggards, or best in class, pioneers, or fast copiers. This recognition equially ‘inform’ much of the innovation activity. What types of business model are you working towards, where is the scope to expand and explore from the innovation perspective? What processes and structures would then need to be in place to compliment and align to the strategic aspirations or positioning stated?

These answers become the foundation that aligns strategy direction with innovation activity.

These can only come from formulating strategic thinking between the strategy of the organization (its goals, mission and visions) and innovation, for it to be directed in its efforts to contribute to these aims and growth aspirations.

Then the other, often the unspoken silent part, of any strategic thinking that needs to be drawn out, actually revolves around the ‘creative destruction’ being faced, externally and internally. It indicates the prevalence of change and opens the dialogue up on how innovation will respond to this. Often boards remain in denial or lack the essential relevant understanding of the changes occurring and do not address change or transformation as strongly as they should in any strategic design. Innovation then has a really hard time to respond.

This is the way I recommend to set about this alignment to build an Innovation Master Plan.

It is structured and designed and externally facilitated. Facilitation becomes critical as the external provider can ‘draw out’ all the different views, often highly diverging, where predudices and opinions abound, around innovation. Opinions differ so much, you need to work through divergence to then seek the convergence. It is only when you get a ‘collective view’ you can begin to get that greater alignment of strategic and innovation activities

Here is how I suggest you might set about alignment….

Firstly I have written explicitly on the Executive Innovation Work Mat, making the compelling case and one outline of the framework offering a further alignment view, as I believe this Work Mat approach becomes a critical framework to communicate the fit of innovation and strategy. It becomes the “living” innovation document to refer too, engagement with (and improve). I co-devolped this executive innovation work mat with Jeffrey Phillips from Ovo Innovation.

We need to work through The Critical Value Propositions of the Three Horizon Methodology (link to download paper) to clarify our portfolio of options, in the present and in the future.

Within that Innovation Work Mat approach it is designed to allow engagement from the top to communicate and cascade down the organizations, to allow for the growing understanding of how and where innovation fits and what is provided to support this. I believe the “cascading effect” becomes critical to success and often missed out in any innovation thinking This design of the Work Mat allows for a greater connected design of innovation.

Innovation needs alignment- Resources to refer too.

Available is a short presentation on this innovation alignment approach to the choice cascade view, as used in the Executive Innovation Work Mat Framework. Here is a download to its cascading effect approach: Cascading Choices for Greater Alignment (a PDF file)

Exploring the Executive Innovation Work Mat I have equally set up a dedicated section on the Work Mat under “insights and thinking” as “booklets” in its design and value on each of its components. So can you explore the three horizons here and relate to it further, as essential for managing innovation in multiple ways.

Workshops on the Executive Innovation Work Mat can be delivered as outlined in this suggestion one: (Intervention Approach Work Mat 2017). Each Workshop always has some level of unique design, as each organization is on its own journey of innovation understanding. The framework and its seven components is built accordingly to bring it together as an integrated ‘whole’.

By contacting the writer you can discuss this further as it is designed to bring strategic choice and innovation together in a more cohesive way. It aligns, communicates and engages but it is how we set about this, will determine its potential for achieving greater success and ‘connected’ understanding.

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We are in need of a common language for innovation

@paul4innovating — Thu, 22 Jun 2017 12:57:20 +0000

German Late Medieval (c. the 1370s) depiction of the construction of the tower.

Any innovation common language needs working upon. It firstly needs recognition it is in our best interests to find a common point. It needs to be relevant to each of us, it must be current, appropriate, accurate and highly visible throughout the entire organization. It also needs to be allowed to grow and flourish, to evolve and become the lingua franca of all our innovation work. It needs building and constructing in conscious ways and design.

Let’s step back just for one minute, these ‘sentiments’ are fine, yet we actually do, seriously lack a common language for innovation and we should find the ways and the means to change this. It holds innovation back significantly. It can’t continue in a world of greater networking and collaboration.

Languages unites us or keeps dividing us

Language can have the power to unite us or potentially divide us. Developing a language to unite us in our innovation efforts goes some way to reduce disagreements and egos, to qualify individual interpretation or bias, often a key inhibitor that can block a team’s success. It lays in a common foundation. It builds confidence and understanding.

Once we have a common language, we can set about building and creating a more robust innovation management system. One that builds on this framework so it can relate to the relevant context, conditions, and environment for innovation, to offer within this building block, the common identity.

These identifiers can build into better understanding how to structure governance, process, and functional structures, to build a culture that is responsive as ‘they’ can identify a need for a common cause of understanding. It is in this central innovation language that becomes our clear unifying context, the enabler, and sense of personal identity with the purpose of what we are wishing to achieve.

In any common language, we need to master the understanding, the nuances and how it all fits together. We need to exploit it and extract what it can offer to enhance all the work we do in innovation. We need to appreciate always its terms, its definitions (and limitations) and the related performance values that can help to improve our performance and in our achievements of working increasingly with others. A common understanding of our meaning to ‘innovate’ becomes an imperative.

Today we all having a different meaning and interpretations within our innovation understanding.

Each organization has specifics in meaning that can often end up in results that break down and so deliver results totally different from their original intent. As we grow out our collaborations into ecosystems the need for a common language becomes even more vital. For example:

Often misunderstanding occurs, even though we initially thought we had communicated well but those that receive this often apply different interpretations that confirm their personal views,
There is always this risk that others often apply subtle nuances and variations built on their experiences or understanding on how ‘something works’, and it is within these different readings we can suffer costly errors, extensive delays and wrong end results in the final product or service delivery.
We suffer significant inefficiencies because we don’t pay enough attention to ensuring the correct meaning is well understood, we simply believe our way of thinking is the only way it is conveyed to be understood, and as we all know, this is often far from the reality. Context and Communications are kings in my opinion.
We need to seek explicit language and context to allow innovation to do its final job, of delivering a valuable new contribution that builds on the existing and meets new market and customers’ needs or the jobs-to-be-done.

Innovation becomes highly constrained if we fail to find that common language, that common purpose, the understanding of the right context and ended up providing something that was not as good as it could have been, or we simply veered completely off track, on the original insight. It somehow got lost in translation, in applying individual meaning. Translation is one of those keys that can unlock so much within innovation but often it just simply goes the other way and gets “lost in translation”

To apply a common language, we need to invest in its practice

The more we practice and move towards a common understanding of innovation, we are moving towards clarifying and reconciling, as best we can, within the constraints of what common language or context offers. We give innovation a greater chance to succeed. A common language enables greater transparency, clarity in accountability through its definitions; we achieve greater collaborative dialogues and meet more concurrence than without this move towards a common understanding.

So much of innovation is piecing together many fragmented pieces, strands of knowledge that can be unstructured can be very ambiguous, yet requires sound judgment. Innovation builds on shared experience and the quality of its interaction points. The more we learn to collaborate, the more we begin to share experiences, the more we achieve a growing common language. We need to bring together increasingly the parts that growing specialization, our limited grasp of all the complexities that can influence a decision. We need to constantly reconcile incoming information with our own language of understanding, so we need to strive towards improving the common parts surely?

I think as we build a common language we need a certain learning rhythm.

This is where absorptive capacity can come in, as it offers a structured way of building our knowledge understanding and fits within this. Absorptive capacity has the different steps of acquiring, assimilating, transforming and exploiting but these need a clear sequence, structure, and commonality to their approach, to gain the lasting benefit.

A common language of innovation working to a common end cause also allows for a knowledge learning repository to be built up, so all can potentially prosper as their starting point to innovate, as they learn from past experiences and insights. Innovation is something we all can do, not just a selected few but it is sharing our knowledge can encourage others to find the time and then invest in all of what it can mean to them; liberating them to explore alternatives and exploit their experiences by applying something ‘gained’ as something

Innovation is something we all can do, not just a selected few but it is sharing our knowledge can encourage others to find the time and then invest in all of what it can mean to them; liberating them to explore alternatives and exploit their experiences by applying something ‘gained’ as something enhancing.

A bedrock for building and sustaining innovation is a common intent, language, and context

Forming a common language should be the bedrock for how we set about innovation. It cannot be silo driven or developed to fit one individual team, unless you want stilted results with incremental innovation being most likely as the best you can achieve most of the time, within this ‘constraint’, as we increasingly need to reach out and learn to collaborate

How we go about our communications, what and who you can connect with and your level of innovation engagement, do matter significantly. It is the ability to find the common identity, a real unifying sense of purpose that sends positive signals to all involved and those interested parties, often external to your ‘inner’ innovation process, to engage fully.

A common language can change much within innovation. Can we find the investment time to build this into the work we need to do? We should. It is in all of our future collaborating interests.

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Constructing Innovation as Value Management

@paul4innovating — Thu, 26 Nov 2015 16:27:08 +0000

Innovation needs to create value, both short-term and progressively over time. It fuels the growth and fires the imagination.
Yet our innovation activities are constantly coming up short for the leaders within our organizations, who continue to remain disappointed in its final outcome to stimulate and drive the growth they want to see.
It is actually the classic “chicken and egg”. Aristotle (384–322 BC) was puzzled by the idea that there could be a first bird or egg and concluded that both the bird and egg must have always existed. Leaders need to lead and are they the chicken, they are the resource for how can the people charged with innovation can lay the ‘golden eggs’ needed, if they are incapable of laying? Or should the innovation egg come first for our leaders to become more confident and build further, believing in innovation far more?
There should be no dilemma we can’t treat innovation lightly anymore, it needs to develop its uniqueness for each of our organizations to evolve. We need both the egg and the chicken to be ‘producing’.
What I’m driving towards here is that innovation is evolving is my 1st point

It is impossible to reach a certain desired outcome because a necessary precondition is not satisfied.
We have got caught up in the word “innovation” and not given it the depth of thought it requires to deliver on its expectant promise. There is a need to change this.
Firstly, we all need to realize that innovation is going through significant change. The chicken that lays the egg is changing; it is evolving right before our eyes.
There is this increasing need to understand and incorporate ecosystems, platforms, and the greater use of analytics, big data and reliance on technology into our innovation thinking.
There is increasing emphasis on thinking through new business models, combining design thinking, lean management, customer development, prototyping, experimenting outside the lab, collaborating with clients, finding different partners, the different exploitation of research techniques are all breaking out in different forms and combinations.
All these are crowding in and adding more into our innovation activity. Leaders of our organizations need to understand this evolving is specific to them not just surviving but thriving. It is the case that the chicken needs to lay eggs, the egg needs the chicken.
To shift innovation we need to think this is our value creation point.
We derive our value management from much of the innovation we are creating but we seemingly can’t get the required attention of the leadership to innovation to attract across the resources and determine the risk profile to achieve the value needed. We are back to the ‘chicken and the egg’ again.
So we need to change how we view innovation. We need to make it THE value creation point.
I’ve written previously three blogs that I feel are very relevant here. I will not bore you with extracting points or quoting from them. I’d like you to go to them and actually (re)read them.
The first is “Where innovation value resides”. The second is “So what drives value creation”” and the third is “Exploring the value of your innovation capital”.
Making a case for redefining innovation into the value focal point
I want to move on, actually we all need to move on in innovation and its management, so to make the case of redefining innovation, making it central to the value management we require within our organizations, so here is a thought or two.
To help me here I want to acknowledge the work going on over at the IIRC with their reporting. Integrated reporting will progressively change the way organizations will be reporting in the future. The pressure is on, for a more integrated thinking to be conveyed to stakeholders, linking stronger, wider governance that takes a far more whole business perspective into account and report on it.
This integrating requires a significant linkage across the organization and greater understanding of where the true value lies. This is innovation’s opportunity to become ‘front and center’ the absolute essential core to build.
I do not want to step out of syncing here; I want innovation to be ‘in sync’. Value management is discovering, realizing and optimizing to achieve a greater performance. That is the same stages we go through in innovation and its management. Some of us might call them differently but we seek out to discover, we realize our ideas and concepts and we set about within this a growing optimization.
Building up our competences is in four needed parts.
Like we need to break down our innovation into four parts that need really critical attention.
The first is the vision for better innovation, the second is the clarity that innovation not only is required for the short-term performance but is critical to have IM creating value over time.
The third part is determining what is needed for value creation and communicating and reinforcing this in time, attention and resources. The forth part is turning our creativity, our ideas into the value management required to grow the organization and sustain it into the future. Lets tackle each part.
The vision thing
Our leadership really does a poor job of providing a compelling innovation vision. They might give it a bye-line in the broader corporate strategy, they might extend this out but are they making the innovation vision, mission, goals and objectives clear enough. I think not.
Can they articulate the drivers of innovation in how they see the market going? Can they describe in sufficient detail the objectives and contribution of innovation, can they set about purposefully shaping the structures? Do they clarify the terms and conditions, establish the common language innovation requires?
Can they describe the relationship between all the interconnected parts, as suggested in the Executive Innovation Work Mat approach or similar? Finally can they really offer a determined view on innovations place within their needs to grow the organization?
The creating value over time
To do this they need to present the benefits of where, what and how they see innovation needing to contribute into the organizations plans and cascade this message out. They need to articulate why innovation is in the interest of the organization and begin to clarify the longer-term value creation that comes from this integrated innovation thinking.
Can they help guide how value is created, explain how value creation can differ and allow for different perspectives to bubble up and shape each person’s perspective.
How will they define and encourage a growing understanding of each of the innovation capitals? How these each can link, constantly be recombined in different ways to create the value through their unique properties that require constant attention to nurturing each of these capitals, making them all contribute to learning and value-generating capitals that build a growing competence and capability to innovate.
Integrated thinking evolves over time. As the leadership explains its role, determines and allocates the roles within the organization, not just delegate all of it down to others, the result comes from change management. This is about openly discussing and recognizing different barriers and purposefully setting about breaking these down and establishing a more system thinking approach, in managing all the connectivity this requires.
Communicating the value creation coming from innovation
Innovation creates a lot of tension points. It requires good governance, not a heavy-handed one, that is rule-bound or individually determined, but one that is well-framed and reflects this integrated thinking.
Governance of innovation is vital. It requires clear guiding principles, it has to have a future orientation, it needs to establish boundaries but establish the ways to step over these in controlled ways.
Innovation is full of day-to-day interactions, it is through these we gain insight; we can advance or determine what is next for that specific innovation concept. The engagement process becomes important to allow it to move up and down the organization to deliver on the interactions the necessary decision. Innovation needs a collating point, so as material aspects can be ‘flagged’ and resolved.
It is the setting about of exploiting and exploring innovation we can build a common cause and clarity of our mindset to undertake the task, building a clearer sense of purpose and over time a clear vocabulary of learning. We can learn to determine risk and opportunity the more we engage, not hide from it. Risk management of innovation needs a stronger focus and determined view on what is acceptable, what needs more work and what is not possible,
We need to think more on outcomes and less on outputs. We need to encourage exploring the different types of innovation we are capable of exploiting. We simply need to disclose more openly both up and down the organization.
Finally the turning of innovation into value management.
If we can identify the conditions to innovate that can lead to (likely) better outcomes, identify the barriers and work towards reducing them by describing and driving towards their reduction and explain the challenges in open, realistic and inclusive ways, then within the role of senior managers it can determine the innovation sense of mission, of their ‘collective purpose.
This should become a constantly updated ‘living, breathing innovation capacity’ determining the health, conditions and environment of the innovation ecosystem.
It is the recognition that this more integrated thinking allows for the conditions to seek out increasing value, managed in a purposeful way.
So what are the possible benefits for all this additional and ongoing work?
We can look towards an increased understanding of all that connects to make innovation the value creator required. We gain a better cohesive whole of understanding of how the organization sets about and creates value.
Integrated thinking applied to our whole innovation system will (eventually) rise decision-making, allowing confidence and knowledge to flow. It begins to put into place the balance between short-term exploitation and longer-term exploration by supporting both, it signals where risk lies and what is tolerated or encouraged.
It will definitely raise engagement, it will encourage a greater collaborative thinking. It strengths the connections between vision, goals, targets, missions and objectives and the organization, being clearer on going about its business and recognizing the importance of innovations value contribution.
In conclusion
The case to think of innovation in a more integrated way has been stated many times. Innovation as we seem to know can create real, often substantial value, capable of adding significantly to the growth of organizations. It is the growth enabler.
We need to unlock innovations prospective tangible value from its many intangible capitals that form unique and constantly evolving relationships.We need to evolve our innovation thinking, we need a more integrated approach.
The more we are explicit and articulate our value creation, giving it clarity and context, the more we are treating innovation as the central point of driving our value creation management. Organizations need innovation, it is, or certainly should be unique, strategic and working at the core. Innovation has transforming power.

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Successful Innovation needs a common language, context and communicating

@paul4innovating — Sun, 23 Mar 2014 10:24:09 +0000

The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563)

People disconnect because they lack what is needed to connect! Innovation thrives from the knowledge and you need to make sure this is allowed to flow.

To achieve those essential knowledge connections, you need a shared understanding of innovation, that common sense of purpose as a framework. This will though, always stay a work-in-progress.

You need to begin to build a common language of greater understanding. We need to unite around innovation. Imagine if you work consciously to put knowledge in the hands of people willing to make innovation happen, what the potential might be?

Give people the power of the context for their innovation engagement and that shifts everything to give them a clearer shape and meaning. You are laying out the conditions, criteria and circumstances, giving innovation its foundations.

Connecting the seven parts of the Innovation Work Mat

In this series of articles I will be looking at each of the seven components within the executive innovation work mat to raise questions, to probe and prompt the necessary thinking that needs to be made in organizations around building innovation that sustains and delivers to the strategic need.

This is the fifth post in the series, here I’m exploring the essential need to build a common language, gain growing identity through knowing the context for your innovation activities by communicating these to build a lasting innovation connection and organizational awareness. This flows from the top and cascade down the organization to make the essential connections and alignment.

Giving people space through communicating the common understanding

What would happen if you allow people to openly invent, to brainstorm, to generate initial concepts and prototypes because they understand the strategic innovation framework. One that lays out a vision of meaningful innovation that would be valued as it is more aligned to the strategic direction.

For me, the executive innovation work mat moderates an organizations innovation. It can go much towards reducing the multiple interpretations and personal agenda’s of a variety of initiatives often described or justified as essential innovation but constantly miss the strategic mark.

Closing the innovation gap design

If you have in place a clear innovation framework you offer a communicating mechanism to guide innovation activity. The framework can establish a common language, a growing sense of common cause for this to ignite innovations focused activity.

You can cascade this down the organization and actively look for the cascading effect to flow back up in new ideas, a sense of engagement and purpose.

You are looking for everyone involved to understand ‘the bigger picture’, to look towards the communicating platform so they can move their innovation activity back and forth within the structures, processes and systems designed for innovation to align them to the organizational strategic need.

Innovation becomes increasingly more connected as it is more integrated in its designs, use of resources and outcomes, to meet the more complex challenges being face in a competitive world.

Engagement can become the behavioural footprint needed for change

If you give each person a sense of meaning, that explicit and implicit encouragement because this is coming to them in an integrated message- the seven components of the executive innovation work mat – it can shift their mind, it can direct their energies. Engagement can become the catalyst for exciting innovation if there is this sense of trust, continuity and the identification is well-constructed and makes sense. Organizations do need a commonly shared framework that moderates innovation

There are so many aspects to get right in innovation. These can be ensuring the culture, climate and environment for innovation are working well, it could mean setting up processes, well-designed procedures and structures, it can be providing innovation governance.

Each part has a vital part to play in being combined for innovation, so it can function but these are not the core. Our identification with innovation is that core.

Working on innovation needs a deep commitment

German Late Medieval (c. 1370s) depiction of the construction of the tower.

We need to work hard to communicate that innovation is different than ‘business as usual’.

The fact ‘we’ are building something different and we need to build this together. A counter to existing processes, the commitment need is to overcome practices honed over many years.

This needs thinking through in its value and importance.

If the Senior Executive is not totally involved in creating the imperatives needed in innovation then the organization lacks the context. Signalling the kind of innovation and breadth of impact – delivers the vital aspects.

Well stated innovation objectives can shift the focus of the organization substantially. It generates collective building capacity.

Incremental to Disruptive require different engagement points – actions send signals to the organization and having clear governance provides guidance to risk, principles and the mechanisms to manage these two ‘extremes in innovation and all in-between.

By providing a strategic innovation framework you provide consistency in purpose, you are aligning innovation to strategic need and by actively engaging across the seven components, sharing their conclusions, these can create the dynamic aspects and sense of growing identity. You need to send a compelling set of messages throughout the organization.

Innovation engagement needs a common language, a clear sense of purpose of innovations context and the mechanisms to communicate and cascade these intents throughout the organization to bring people onto the same page.

Obtaining a ‘given’ flow for innovation

Designing a new strategic innovation framework at the top of organizations helps close the many gaps we see today. There is a flow for improving innovation performance. If we don’t frame the business context how can we compare and contrast? How do we know what we are missing or what it is meant to be achieving? When we go about seeking out opportunities we need to understand the context these are placed in.

Educating, informing, clarifying constantly simply helps formulate understanding and aids execution. We need to find ways to communicate a common language, a common way to frame the needs expected from innovation.

When we work together we can move mountains

You can eventually achieve a common identity that begins to move ‘mountains’ through collective achievement, one that is both distinctive and unique to your organization. A clear uniqueness that can never be copied, one that allows you to stand out as true distinctive innovators, admired and even envied.

We get closer to achieving a consistent, more vibrant innovation as it becomes more routine and embedded, for it becomes increasingly linked to everyone’s goals, a certain oneness and because of this, it is sustaining.

We identify as we understand what our contribution will be, then the leadership has done its primary job, its aligned innovation purpose to the goals, by laying out the parameters to achieve this.

Successful CEO’s achieve organisational connection

CEO’s that are seen to be successful achieve connections, what is often called that emotional connection through describing the context, setting the values and vision-driven criteria and by often pushing the organization towards ‘impossible goals’.

It is amazing how this brings alignment as long as it is consistent, constant in its messages and widely shared and understood and the organization see’s the leadership engaging, visibly seeking and believing in innovation and what it can potentially deliver.

Delivering a coherent and consistent innovation message that resonates

The Choice Cascade Integrative Innovation Model

I suggest the Choice – Cascade integrated innovation model. One that can connect and deliver a consistent and coherent innovating performance across the organization.

I believe there is an essential gap within the way we set about innovation today. There is needing to be well-articulated and well-communicated innovation strategy that flows both ways in searching for the best solutions that align to the organizational strategic needs.

We need to find more fluid and flexible organizations that respond through searching for innovation consistency. They need to have a ‘flow’ of knowledge, of clarity, of a sense of scale in their learning and dialogues that promotes greater successful innovation outcomes as the sense of on-going mission.

The orchestrator needs to orchestrate.

We need to align, offer clear vision and purpose and this needs orchestrating from the top of the organization to the bottom. Organizations need an integrated innovation strategic framework that can deliver commonality in understanding, in purpose, in language. Then this needs to be cascaded

To do this you must orchestrate the capabilities, to purposefully build innovation. Orchestration is fundamentally dynamic, full of uncertainties but the need is still to connect the parts. To orchestrate you need to communicate and conduct to make the innovation music

The important “C’s” of innovation

The Seven Components that make up the Executive Innovation Work Mat

For me, the central part of the Executive Innovation Work Mat has been deliberately placed, it conveys the important “C’s”of innovation.

This is made up of the search to build a common language, to put innovation in its appropriate context, to work on communicating and cascading this throughout the organization can spark the distinctive aspects.

The ultimate aim is identification, understanding and then build up the capability, capacity and competencies required to deliver on the integrated approach taken. This is led from the top through this work mat approach and fully cascaded throughout the organization to align and bring innovation to life for all involved.

The post Successful Innovation needs a common language, context and communicating first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Measuring and motivating the innovation elephant

@paul4innovating — Fri, 21 Mar 2014 16:22:35 +0000

I often think of the parable of “The Elephant and the Blind Men” when I get into discussions about measuring innovation.

What are truths, what are the fallacies? The parable implies that one’s often subjective experience can be true on your need, but not necessarily the other person’s view of their understanding of value.

You get, as the end result, a failure to account for other ‘beliefs’ or capture the real value and miss providing broader motivations to encourage the innovation elephant along.

Establishing the right metrics that motivate and yield the result you are looking for is sometimes a tough challenge. You should always start with the bigger picture, organizational needs and then design the metrics and cascade these throughout the organization.

This part of the series explores the Innovation Work Mat

In a series of articles I will be looking at each of the seven components within the executive innovation work mat to raise questions to probe and prompt the necessary thinking that needs to be made in organizations at different management levels determined to build a lasting innovation competence and structure.

Within this work mat series I’ve already offered some opening thoughts on the role of Governance and Innovation, and also the Environment for innovation matters to innovate followed by the innovating conditions for your Culture and Climate.

This is the fourth article aimed at deeper engagement and understanding of the connected parts within innovation management on Metrics and Motivations.

Raising some initial thoughts here.

We really struggle to describe, then measure and then find the right motivations and reward mechanisms and then achieve broad agreement, on something as important as innovation.

If we link metrics into the reward and compensation structure then we release all the energy, passion and anguish and these can serve in many contrary ways.

Linking compensation into all the competing motivations to manage and reward innovation activity is fraught with problems and can have many negative consequences.

Again my elephant comes back into view wandering around in your board room – it can disrupt everything as it charges after the results that it wants, trampling much that is good in its path.

Today’s particular trend of focusing on short-term performance can limit innovation significantly and has innovation consequences.

Let’s look at metrics and motivations with greater connected awareness.

At the end of the story on the elephant and the blind men, a wise man was passing; listened to all the different views of why no one could agree on what they thought the elephant was like. The wise man then replied “All of you are right; you were touching different parts of the elephant so the elephant has all the features as you all said”

Metrics and motivation can really make innovation happen

The value of the measures lies in resolving these eight different questions: 1) are they clear and simple 2) are they relevant to you and the central issues 3)are they timely in what can be achieved, 4)are they credible to the stakeholders involved 5) do they relate to the importance of the goals or trivial, 6) can we act upon them 7) are they consistent to the strategic message and aligned, and finally, 8) are all the investment in these measurements and motivators to capture and analyse, seem sensible and affordable, and lead to real impact in aiding innovation to achieve the goals required.

We do need to focus on the future innovating purpose surely?

The innovation links to any measurement system I would argue should point towards the organization’s strategic need and the innovation outcomes required. Within this there are broadly three parts: 1) knowing the organization’s future-orientated vision and the general direction that innovation needs to take, 2) along with the strategic carriers in types, priorities, functions, the indicated mix of innovation activities and then 3) the growth gap that exposes the organizations’ challenges, so as to bridge these knowledge and resource gaps.

These can build innovation capacity today for future innovating outcomes as they are focused on future work to be done.

For me the output intention of the Integrated Executive Innovation Work Mat should be driving the business case for how innovation contributes and offers the what, where, when, and why within the communications for others to be mobilized into actions and build out build upon this strategic working document.

Then we set about communicating it to the organization

I have written before about the cascading effect and communicating value that can support this. Then our metrics begin to cascade down to bring people, the process, and the innovative design of inputs and outputs turn into successful alignment outcomes can come into play. I’ll broaden out my thinking on this area in the next post.

It is within the leadership of organizations to become intimately involved in what is important in innovation for their organization, otherwise, we are back to the elephant and the blind men. All others simply believe they have the answer. Leadership needs to really engage in where it ‘expects’ innovation to yield its results and then ensures it links reward to this set of outcomes.

So what does success look like?

We should start with the ideals that our innovation activities should be pervasive, to be sustainable and we need to deliver clear business results mapped to known and potential unrecognised customer needs as our primary incentive points.

We need to layout the building blocks to ‘group’ management and employee identification with what is innovation success. It can begin to motivate all the stakeholders involved. This gives us the opportunity to evaluate appropriate resources, provide the workable benefits related to learning, encourage the identification of problems and encourage the identification of solutions and set about communicating to all involved the understanding of what success can look like.

Building the innovation metric and motivation scorecard there are hundreds of measures you could bring into anything; the skill is you need to find only the right few that focus upon the results you really need achieving. They need to somehow “talk to each other” so they are mutually reinforcing and all involved are pulling in a similar direction.

What gets measured should connect and matter – an example

I like one I came across some years back, by Cap Gemini, which firstly suggested you define what innovation was going to be about. Their example was “a robust creative process that turns out very distinct outputs with significant impact in the market place” and then worked on a scale for assessing the degree of innovativeness on a three-dimensional grid of Impact, Distinctiveness and Creative Process.

This then becomes the measuring and motivation barometer tied to the strategic need of an organization of what is expected out of innovation. That sort of complete picture can only come from the senior managements full committed to “wanting distinct outputs of significant impact in the market place”

I think Bain & Co offered also a really valuable performance measuring framework.

This framework offers a really good structure to begin to measure and link the organization. I think it can stimulate initial thinking well.

(click to enlarge)

There is a case for approaching measurement differently through the intangibles that make up most of our capital.

Measuring attempts need to take into account the many intangibles that make up innovation and make them tangible. Understanding the relationships within our intangibles allows groups to benchmark, diagnose, allocate resources, inform others and compensate employee’s efforts through their ongoing knowledge learning. The understanding of our intangibles is for me vital to crack.

Getting this right is increasingly important as the intellectual capitals are being recognized as the real value creation intersections. Establishing the metrics that focus on generating valuable innovation also helps extend ambition and future goals, pushing future innovation strategies as you grow in confidence and understanding of these dynamics.

To end we go back to avoid the story of the Elephant and the blind men.

By taking the integrated approach through the work mat, senior leaders can offer strategic guidelines into the measures and motivations, by laying out their beliefs and expectations from innovation. They can’t afford to leave this open-ended, just being hopeful, innovation activities need essential alignment.

If we continue to allow the ‘blind men’ to offer their separate opinions and then decide in isolation of the bigger picture, they ‘see’ only their part of the elephant.

I believe if you put in place that critical strategic innovation document, wrestled out of engaging across all the work mat parts, the metrics and motivators can ‘form’ around this strategic intent. This can drive innovation performance.

Seeing the whole picture is the team sitting on (at) the top, directing the innovation elephant along its journey to the destination where they want it to go. Metrics and motivations follow as the path is clearer to measure and travel. We need those wise men to clarify this.

The post Measuring and motivating the innovation elephant first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Seven Parts to the Innovation Leaders Litmus Test

@paul4innovating — Thu, 23 Jan 2014 11:35:01 +0000

Seven parts to the Innovation Litmus Test for the Executive Innovation Work Mat methodology

Let’s cut straight to the chase, to achieve the alignment of innovation to the organizations strategic goals and ambitions is so highly critical, yet we are, in so many cases, failing to meet this essential objective. We end up in that position where innovation disappoints.

We should bring together all that makes up those considerable efforts that goes into all our innovation activity. We need to work at strongly aligning all the innovation activities into the organizations goals and agenda. So how? Stay with me, I believe its valuable to your finding better innovation solutions.

To this end the Innovation Executive Work Mat was designed. I would recommend you consider this within your innovation thinking. It provides a structured framework for an organization to gather around but it is leadership driven and often this is simply missing within innovation activities.

We are in need of fresh growth through innovation

To gain growth and improvement on the existing position you need to harness innovation in sustaining ways. We need to test for our ability to manage innovation in a well-structured and thoughtful way. The leadership of organizations needs a way to provide an overarching framework, where innovation ‘works’ within.

A crucial part of this is to gain organizational alignment; we need to see if innovation is being adopted, if innovation is cascading through the organization, if the people involved are talking the same language, working towards the common goals. We need to manage and organize how the organization and its people view innovation and respond to the challenges provided from the top.

How do we harness all the necessary efforts for a positive ‘reaction’?

I’ve discussed these seven parts to a litmus test before but I’d like to give them a renewed ‘sharper’ focus here. These are testing for:

1. Translation points in value, impact and alignment – the value of the Executive Work Mat is to gain alignment, to promote value and achieve a better positive impact from innovation. We must test for this through the Work Mat framework.

2. The Leadership Commitment – how leaders chose to engage, to encourage and promote innovation activity is critical. They need to mentor, coach, listen and respond to the concerns, opportunities and offer their contribution and judgement. It is the time they commit to making this Work Mat vigorous, robust and dynamic is all important.

3. Testing for People’s involvement – In some recent research by Deloittes on what is required for successful collaboration they felt three conditions needed to be in place. These I really resonated with strongly, in where I feel any litmus test for innovation should focus upon these factors when it comes to people and their engagement with the challenges presented by the organization:

Do they Belong: people collaborate on behalf of organizations they feel connected too.
Do they Believe: people collaborate when they commit to carrying out specific actions
How do they Behave: people collaborate when they share a common understanding of how things are done. It is through the Work Mat you can gain this common understanding and identification.

4. Designed-In All Necessary Aspects – the effectiveness of any innovation system is within its design, its processes and functioning. Here within the litmus test you are looking far more at establishing, generating, exploring, validating and using what is available and learning from it. It is in the care and thoughtfulness of the design and its environment and through these, its strong governance and structures.

5. Engagement, Understanding & Trust Outputs – the ability to communication, to find a growing common language of innovation is vital to sustaining success. It boils down to the relating, the responding and the respecting of this. Identification and dialogue allows innovation to flow more freely. Respect generates growing trust. Trust is vital to innovation. Knowing the context you set about your work is essential.

6. Risk & Rewards are both needed – Always the risk and fear working on innovation naturally comes up, it consciously needs to be addressed. To assess the exposure, the barriers, the balances and checks needed, the learning from success and failure needs openly exploring. The more we work on the risk and rewards and treat them both equally in discussions and evaluation, the more we encourage innovation that changes those existing paradigms and pushes for growth beyond the norm.

7. Finally, we always need Outcomes – Any effort or initiative has to have outcomes measured on its return of effort and cost involved. It is focusing on effective implementation, on execution, on gaining a ROI and on achievements you can raise the awareness and value of innovation. Outcomes become essential to drive and sustain innovation. People hunger for success, leaders also, so never forget to analysis success and its ‘transforming’ impact.

Working the litmus test

We work these seven litmus tests work through the Executive Innovation Work Mat framework in a gap analysis, in workshops, in discussions, mentoring and insights, to deliver a positive cascading result that ‘resonates’ throughout the organization.

We are looking to conduct a ‘decisively indicative test’ in the effectiveness of taking this holistic approach to innovation and through testing in these areas we can provide a good indicative litmus test of overall robustness to harness innovation activities.

Adopting the litmus test for delivering sustaining innovation

So for me, to achieve a lasting value out of the suggested Executive Work Mat you need to do these litmus tests and impact assessments to gauge the successful cascading and alignment effects. You are looking for the connection between engagement, alignment and ownership through deepening this growing identification of where innovation fits.

The Executive Innovation Work Mat Approach

If you have not yet considered the Executive Work Mat then I would simply encourage you to reach out and make that first connection, knowing a positive result from the ‘effect’ can make or break your organization. We need to pull together much of our fragmented parts of innovation into a cohesive whole.

The approach taken within the Work Mat is to emphasise that to succeed in innovation you need a more holistic approach.

I’d suggest this Work Mat methodology can provide this. Interested to learn more?

The post Seven Parts to the Innovation Leaders Litmus Test first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

A Cascade of Better Choices for Greater Innovation Outcomes

@paul4innovating — Wed, 10 Jul 2013 11:13:26 +0000

It is not an easy job to achieve the level of consistent innovation expected within any organization. Often those breakthroughs never seem to be repeated, we struggle to understand the reasons why we can’t achieve that regular rhythm or dependable outcomes from the innovation portfolio, that we would have expected or the board demands.

If you ever look at high performance in sport it is in the consistent, hour-upon-hour, day-upon-day of dedicated practice, hard work and consistent honing that gets you to that performance point. You seek to reduce deviance; you look to achieve a certain consistency.

Business Organizations will like that approach, it ‘plays’ to the efficiency and effectiveness message, it offers up predictability and reliability that allows for dedicated planning and ‘predicting’ solid performance and certainly. This is ideal for those investors looking for consistency in results and dividends and the Executive Board yearns for.

Today uncertainly asks for a different performance

Today, we face a different type of performance – one that is not ‘just’ dependable but one that is often unpredictable, one that seems perhaps more suited to innovation that outsmarts others in unique ways.

We need to be predictable in performance but we need to deliver unpredictable innovation that wows our customers and the markets to achieve this. To do this you have to run today’s organizations faster, better, in more active and engaged ways to extract the best from it but to allow it to exploit options consistently and with clear purpose.

This engagement needs a different honing than most organizations are certainly not capable of delivering, without thinking long and hard about the way they must undertake a more transformational pathway. One that can connect and deliver a consistent and coherent innovating performance across the organization.

With so much around us, of unprecedented levels of disruption and uncertainly, unrelenting competitive pressure, fickle markets and customers, it creates either a ‘freezing at the top’, a paralysis-effect focusing just on short-term incremental measures or the “going for it” with huge ‘big bets’ that risk losing the whole farm. There must be better ways to manage in these times of uncertainty without having to choose one end of the spectrum or the other?

Managing innovation well is this middle way.

Innovation requires careful managing. I like to put the emphasis of innovation behind both efficiency in innovation and effectiveness in innovation. Innovation may never be simply predictable but it can be well-managed, to extract and leverage its best performance but to achieve this it needs a highly focused top management engagement. Often we are not seeing this in many organizations today.

You simply can’t delegate innovation down the organization. Innovation needs to be as aligned, as honed to strategy, to extracting from its available resources as anything else in organizations. It needs connecting, it needs articulating, it needs framing, it needs cascading throughout the organization.

We need to cascade innovation down the organization.

I believe there is an essential gap within the way we set about innovation today. There is a need for a well-articulated and well-communicated innovation strategy that can be delivered in an organizing framework that has been called the Executive Innovation Work Mat. Over a series of articles and blog posts I have laid out the Value Proposition for this.

In obtaining the right innovation engagement at the top of our organizations, well communicated throughout the entire company, we reduce distance and bridge many current disconnects surrounding innovation. We consistently raise performance.

Triggering the cascade-effect is seeking out broad adoption.

How do we achieve firstly, a change in performance that is both rapid but also one that works on consistently looking for improving performance over the longer-term? We need to think ‘velocity’ not only down organizations; we need to encourage this sense of movement in multiple directions, flowing back up organizations in knowledge and understanding with the ‘result’ of going out performing in greater successful innovations, time and again.

I’ve previously written on the cascading effect needed for innovation success looking at two-way flows and the value of closer alignment.

I want to go one step further in THREE VISUAL CASCADING steps

We need to achieve alignment, all sorts of alignment. We need to convey throughout the organization and encourage a closer alignment on not just what to do but also to support the how to do it as well as the where to do it.

The Choice-Cascade Integrative Model used in the Executive Innovation Work Mat solutions

We need to leverage across the entire ecosystem that makes up the organizations place where we consciously work on immediate impact points in this year’s innovation outcomes but also what is going to give us this longer-term transformational effect.

This requires a huge emphasis on collaborative efforts, on promoting behaviours and matching understanding within a greater transparent organization climate and culture.

The Choice-Cascade throughout the Organizations Environment, used for the Executive Innovation Work Mat

What we are looking for is a cascade of better choices to achieve the desired innovation outcomes that only an integrated innovation design can achieve. This is where the engagement from the top of the organization becomes pivotal. They ‘frame’ the design; they offer the alignment and integrated approach I believe the Executive Innovation Work Mat methodology can provide.

A choice-cascade of better choices used in the Executive Innovation Work Mat methodology

The work mats aim is to engage the top of our organizations to lay out the conditions and result impact they expected from innovation. Then it needs to be cascaded throughout the organization.

Through this cascading-effect you move closer to better choices that can get so much closer to the desired innovation outcomes all involved want to seek out.

A performance that reflects a team’s or organizations best efforts to be best at what they do; the outstanding innovation performance consistent to the needs and growth expectations demanded in today’s constantly changing world.

Where consistency needs to be fluid, flexible, aligned and agile in innovation – that’s the new target performance standard needed.

The post A Cascade of Better Choices for Greater Innovation Outcomes first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The Cascading Effect Needed for Innovation Success

@paul4innovating — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 06:41:41 +0000

Getting innovation through any process of understanding is hard. Knowing what is required to generate innovation throughout an entire organization is even more so.

We need to deploy the cascading effect on innovation

Often we fail to understand our role in contributing to innovation, we need a cascading effect. For me the “cascading effect” for innovation is “a sequence of events in which each produces the circumstances necessary for the initiation of the next”.

It is the presenting of an idea, a concept, prototype, a piece of knowledge that provides the catalyst to be exploited in a broader community as the next step and so on. It cascades. It is where we fit within the innovation web.

Innovation often has to go through a set of stage gates, or cross thresholds, set by others or judged to be the essential cross over points. When you achieve these cross over points you induce more resources, more attention and momentum.

The more it successfully progresses, it eventually gains a higher resilience and then the innovation picks up more for this “cascading effect”.

The more thresholds you cross, you gain space, time, increasing attention within the organization and an increasing identity of what the innovation can achieve. The more it creates a ‘reaction’ or achieves ‘growing interactions’ then the more it ‘cascades’ for producing a cumulative effect moving through the successive stages.

We gain increasing identity and strength the more we get involved in the cascading effect.

Influencing the dynamics within the innovation system

When I have discussed the Executive Innovation Work Mat I have argued you need to achieve this cascading effect as part of the Senior Management Litmus Test for Innovation Engagement.

You need to influence the dynamics within the innovation system; you need to reveal increasingly the challenges and roadblocks to innovation. You need to reduce these challenges down by actively promoting innovation. You do need a well thought-through plan.

Innovation does need structures and systems. It is complex. As we get increasingly involved in innovation activity we meet more of the unforeseen, the uncertainties of working on something new where there is a need to make a decision, often on a limited set of factors than the ideal. We need to reach out for help, for understanding, for assistance.

So ‘the cascade effect for innovation’ often does have to deal with many unforeseen chains of events that need working through, as they can be negative on the system by taking away vital resources from other more valuable, commercially viable projects, or they can be breakthrough or transformational in pursuing.

By having in place a clear Innovation framework you have a communicating mechanism to discuss many of these unforeseen events. It guides innovation activity. The framework can establish a common language; it can offer a sense of the common cause for this to work.

We need to ‘cascade’ this down the organization so everyone can get ‘the picture’ and understand its component parts as well as provide the communication platform across and back up to frame issues as they occur.

I suggest this is based on the Executive Innovation Work Mat, it can offer much in helping innovation if well thought through. Our resources are finite and innovation often suffers even more from this than many other aspects within business.

We do need to provide an organizing innovation framework coming from those that set the strategy. This provides the general roadmap, the direction, the frame where innovation contributes to strategy.

If we don’t have a well-articulated innovation strategy, how do you expect innovations that ‘drive’ the strategy forward to meet its aims?

We have the need to cascade innovation from the top down

We do need a strategic framework to moderate and accelerate meaningful innovation. Often we don’t, this is not provided. For me the framework or work mat moderates innovation and goes much towards reducing the multiple interpretations, and the variety of initiatives often described or justified as innovative but definitely missing the strategic mark.

The majority of people within the organization and who work alongside it would appreciate a greater understanding of the core concepts, principles and direction that their innovation activity should take.

To understand what is valued, essential to defend, promote and improve. To clarify what is highly strategic to describe and ‘form’ around helps innovation to perform its required task, of delivering new growth that aligns into the strategic needs.

Equally, many within organizations where innovation is left more ‘open’ do run the risk that there is an over-emphasis on idea generation. By placing the emphasis point further along the innovation value chain that it is the exploring the benefits that flow from ideas, not the ideas alone, can make a significant difference in improving the quality of innovation and reducing the belief that quantity was the important aspect.

Then we also have to cascade innovation from the bottom up.

The richness of innovation lies not just in the well planned but in the sudden discovery, the pursuit of a game changing innovation concept often stumbled upon. Many of these come from the bottom up. In research labs across the globe, the researcher should have permission, an open endorsement from above, to investigate and explore innovation, not just in their field of ability but equally encouraged in a broader sense, as well.

There are many benefits in building into our daily activities valuable time to explore, to allow employees to investigate ‘something’ that initially may not seem to fit with any prescribed plan of predetermined concepts but from this “free time” emerges something that can evolve and fits perfectly within a good corporate strategy.

Equally there are countless innovations that emerged from nowhere, that had no relationship with the strategic directions, yet have been successful. Are these wrong, should they be ignored, killed off or just simply allowed to happen?

Usually some survive and thrive against all odds, starved of resources, yet they somehow ‘emerge’ and become outstanding contributors to an organizations business.

Organizations need to stay totally alert to these. The issue is the way you approach this. If you insist on innovation that only ‘maps’ back to the innovation strategy, you drive out an awful lot of entrepreneurial energy, you miss many a potential innovation that might have been you next block buster.

We need to find a balance here but it needs visibility and curiosity and allow for time for emerging, unexpected innovations, to permeate before they are finally judged.

The combination effect of wanting to innovate and being able too is the desired end result

Innovation provides organization the very concepts that drive growth, contribute to profits in new ways and allows individuals within the organization to identify with success.

If we don’t offer a sound innovation framework, innovation remains haphazard, left to chance. If we build into peoples work time the chance to explore innovation that ‘fits’ the overarching strategy, we combine the best of both aspects.

What we want to encourage is innovation that allows for both a purposeful approach to innovation that ‘seems’ to align to the direction laid out in the strategy but also to allow for those moments when you stumble upon something that has real promise. We need to allow for both.

Opportunistic and planned innovation can sit side-by-side.

So if innovation can be either opportunistic or planned. To allow everyone to become engaged, to partly dream, to be allowed to explore and can be confident that they can ‘cascade’ both up and down the organization to achieve this innovation effect, then we need to seek out both.

As we “cascade innovation” we need to build and align it to the strategy, the Executive Innovation Work Mat can be the very vehicle to allow that to happen. We need to achieve a uniformed view on the overarching design of our innovation activities and that does need to come from the top.

Designing a new strategic innovation framework at the top of organizations can help close the many gaps we see today in innovation, especially in achieving its need to achieve a growing alignment to an organizations strategy.

We need to move from many present ‘disconnects’ to ‘reconnecting’ and “allowing” innovation to be more cross-cutting, more informative to allow all the people involved in its production that greater freedom and scope in their understanding so as to contribute into the growth organizations leaders are demanding.

The “cascading effect for innovation” has a two-way flow.

We need to encourage bottom up innovation, those that are close to markets, the raw ideas and who can make more connections than those far removed.

We also need the overarching innovation framework so everyone has a growing understanding of where, how, with whom and why innovation needs to head in a ‘given’ set of directions and what are the critical components that enable this to ‘connect and happen’ and provides the ‘how’ it can work.

The components of the Executive Innovation Work Mat, can promote this “cascading effect needed for innovation” to flow both ways and move closer to a well-aligned organization that marks a successful business.

The post The Cascading Effect Needed for Innovation Success first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Taking ownership for innovation – the litmus test.

@paul4innovating — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 14:55:46 +0000

There is always a healthy debate on who has ownership of innovation within any organization. Often it can boil down to where the innovation concept is along the pipeline or who has been designated with manoeuvring or piloting the innovation through its different stages.

The reality of lasting ownership is much tougher; there are huge, often yawning gaps, in innovation accountability. The right answer should of course be everyone but making that statement on its own is a little bit of a cop-out, an easy answer to a complicated dilemma. So let me offer a connected way.

Working through the Executive Work Mat , jointly developed with our friends at Ovo Innovation, this Work Mat was designed for many reasons but principally to gain leadership engagement within all things involving innovation.

One of its overarching principles was the quest to gain alignment from the top, at the board level, through its interconnected structure and their strategic inputs so as to establish and make the critical connections all the way down and throughout the organization.

What we needed also was putting in place a fairly rigorous ‘litmus test‘ to establish if this is achieving the positive reaction required and the Work Mats intent.

These are my thoughts on this.
To achieve the alignment of innovation to the organizations strategy goals and objectives is so critical to have the best chance to deliver the necessary impact needed; to gain growth and improvement on the existing position.

We need to test for alignment, we need to see if innovation is being adopted, if innovation is cascading through the organization. Is it having a positive effect on how the organization and its people view innovation? How do we harness all the necessary efforts for a positive ‘reaction’?

The Litmus Test required for Innovation.

There are two handy definitions of a “litmus test” and why I think this can be applied nicely here in evaluating the value of the Executive Work Mat.

One, a litmus test is used in chemistry to test and establish the acidity or alkalinity of the mixture- I think innovation does prompt plenty of ‘reactions’ so this works well.

The second, is a litmus test becomes a critical indicator of future success or failure, exactly what the Executive work Mat is attempting to influence in managing the innovation efforts.

The other aspect is the ‘cascading’ or ‘waterfall effect’ we need.

To enable the Executive Work Mat to permeate down the organization, it needs to be “cascaded.” This needs to be completed though developing a common language as well as having a constant communications and variety of dialogues, so as to make better connections up and down the organization on the levers, resources and issues to ‘enable and promote’ innovation.

Often a cascading affect is regarded as more of an unforeseen chain of events that suddenly effect the system, they trigger often an unfavourable ‘reaction’.

The effects of any cascading can be analysed and these are often through consequence/impact analysis or even event trees. One can view this within my litmus test explanation in this case, as an impact analysis assessment, to achieve a better alignment and move towards a more positive set of reactions:

Working through the logic of the work mat, what works, what doesn’t?
Is it being understood and aligned with the objectives laid out?
What are the main contributors (and inhibitors) to managing this effectively?
Is there the exercising of regular sets of dialogues to monitor its effectiveness in place?
Is it supporting and enabling a more effective allocation of resource?
Does it assist in the design of the innovation system, if not how can it?
The work mat becomes in itself a diagnostic tool to identify and correct causes and inhibitors as well as accelerate the parts that provide real sustaining impact

The Seven Parts of the Litmus Test – a short summary

Translation points in value, impact and alignment – the value of the Executive Work Mat is to gain alignment, to promote value and achieve a better positive impact from innovation.
The Leadership Commitment – how leaders chose to engage, to encourage and promote innovation activity is critical. They need to mentor, coach, listen and respond to the concerns, opportunities and offer their contribution and judgment.
Peoples involvement – In some recent research by Deloittes on what is required for successful collaboration they felt three conditions needed to be in place. These I really resonated with, in where I feel any litmus test for innovation should focus upon when it comes to people:

Do they Belong: people collaborate on behalf of organizations they feel connected too.
Do they Believe: people collaborate when they commit to carrying out specific actions
How do they Behave: people collaborate when they share a common understanding of how things are done.

Designed-In – the effectiveness of any innovation system is within its design, its processes and functioning. Here within the litmus test you are looking far more at establishing, generating, exploring, validating and using what is available and learning from it. It is in the care and thoughtfulness of the design.

Engagement & Understanding Outputs – the ability to communication, to find a growing common language of innovation is vital to sustaining success. It boils down to the relating, the responding and the respecting of this. Identification and dialogue allows innovation to flow more freely. Respect generates growing trust. Trust is vital to innovation.

Risk & Rewards – Always the risk and fear working on innovation naturally comes up, it consciously needs to be addressed. To assess the exposure, the barriers, the balances and checks needed, the learning from success and failure needs openly exploring.

Finally, we always need Outcomes – Any effort or initiative has to have outcomes measured on its return of effort and cost involved. It is focusing on effective implementation, on execution, on gaining a ROI and on achievements you can raise the awareness and value of innovation. Outcomes become essential to drive and sustain innovation. People hunger for success, leaders also.

Adoption and cascading become our litmus test for delivering sustaining innovation

I’m certainly looking for more workouts in supporting your innovative fitness efforts. Interested?

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