Is this tapping into the increasing desire to be part of creating something new, to grab back the engagement needed, that sense of identity and a growing sense of ownership?

Large organisations sense they are missing out on radically different business opportunities and cast their envious eyes towards the young start-ups, not just coming up with original ideas to solve existing problems and pent-up needs, but seeing the work as potentially disruptive to those managing in the existing space.

This start-up and entrepreneurial spirit are making many senior executives nervous and they want to find ways to harness this within their own organisations, and thus the intrapreneurial movement has been born and is growing fast.

It is tapping into an internal need for everyone involved, to innovate in different and more radical ways. Partly we are seeing a restless younger workforce who want to break out of restricting and confining jobs. They want to find more meaningful ways to contribute, to engage, to find ways where they can be impactful, not just in their careers but in making something happen, that is different and better than the existing.

Driving impact, delivering to scale

Intrapreneurs within large organisations can tap into the amazing ability to drive impact and deliver scale. Starting up a business from scratch is really tough but the high level of failures run at nearly 90% and to emerge from spending 24 x 7 for two or three years may have enormous experience and learning, but it can totally fail in delivering this urge for impact and contribution.

Being part of a larger organisation operating in this intrapreneurial role takes away some of the heavy issues faced by start-ups but replaces these with an equally onerous set of tasks.

Equally beside this younger generational need, those a little older turn to their legacy and sometimes decades of work within their organisation to want to attempt to change part of the culture and deliver some of the ideas that have been ‘frustrating them’ over time.

For the organisation, it is recognising that it has the chance to unleash the talent that lies within. If they can create an environment for some to have a higher level of autonomy, of being creative and getting this clearer sense of meaning, it can help invigorate and renew much that large organizations grapple with daily – the stifling of initiatives, seemingly slow-moving cultures and not seizing on all the opportunities that the market and customers are looking for.

The challenge is in the structure and format and character of those Intrapreneurs

There is no single way to do intrapreneurship. It needs a significant amount of attention, commitment and determination. Each design perhaps is unique to fit individual circumstances.

From the organisations point of view, they need to set up a clear, distinct, more than likely separate business practice that liberates people to build upon their emerging entrepreneurial personalities. They need to build the walls and fences so as to protect the ideas, support the work in progress, nurture the people involved and allow for a higher level of patience to see a return coming ‘down the line’.

The individuals wanting to take on this intrapreneurial role need to think through how to serve the interests of the organization in different ways that break with the existing and normal, learn to exploit and explore all the inner relationships to advance their work and learn to adapt constantly as they go, as they adjust to failure and building upon a series of successes.

The antibodies that lie within any organisation are waiting. Those that fear change and those that feel threatened, jealous or protective of their turf being trampled on. The ones who will want to frustrate, exhaust and determine a pathway towards project death by any means are a constant threat. Intrapreneurs and management alike need to be utterly vigilant in attacking these antibodies if they really see value in promoting this intrapreneurial culture.

The mountains that are needed to be climbed to unleash that Intrapreneur spirit

It all starts with belief, pure and simple. A belief that having Intrapreneurs working within organisations will make a difference in the innovation work needed, and then identifying and encouraging those able to take this task on. Somewhere in this conviction, you can see ideas that can be translated into successful outcomes by unleashing this intrapreneurial spirit. These ideas need to be bigger ideas, perhaps radically different, not the everyday stuff where the organisation should have already set up an innovation process to ‘grind’ these through to successful outcomes.

This needs to send a powerful signal that the official licence to change has been granted, and better support for innovation and growth can partly come from deploying Intrapreneurs. It announces this as a parting of the ways from just the “busyness of business as usual” by exploring new ways to seek out the innovation that can be different but clearly, needs to be managed differently.

So what is different and what does that mean to whom?

Intrapreneurship has to be established as a specific system that can be set up and provided to those wanting to take on a different challenge. It needs to become a solid part of the strategy for innovation otherwise it is quickly seen as ‘just another experiment.’ This would fail to attract the right type of person; it signals a lack of commitment, so those budding Intrapreneurs stay hidden in the woodwork or looking to leave, so as to break free to pursue their personal goals and dreams, even taking away the emerging blueprint to disrupt the very firm that has given them this understanding.

There are many enablers to make this transition happen. The most critical are deep management support, creating a culture for entrepreneurship to thrive and knowing the type of people that can make this happen. The quality of any ideas, the mandate that goes with that idea and the funding and milestones needed to be in place and the clarity of failure and what that means. Each of these becomes a critical enabler to make this concept work.

So then we need to consider values, personalities and the operating conditions.

Firstly not everyone can simply become an intrapreneur you have to possess a certain resilience and toughness. They need high levels of tenacity, this mental toughness and commercial zeal to drive through the concept they are working upon. The optimism, staying ready to adapt, be flexible but also the underlying ‘steel’ to be assertive, creative and determined to push something through, to overcome the many barriers and resistance that comes with exploring more radical innovation.

They must continually make the business case, negotiate and navigate around the system to achieve their ends and that often requires a deep knowledge of the many ‘ins and outs’.

They need to forge their business community, building the identity with what they are undertaking, reaching out to the network both within and outside the organisation. They need to unpick and unlock resources that bring additional ‘scarce’ skills to help, and just fostering this underlying culture of resilience needed both personally and within the project management.

These attributes need nurturing and supporting and this is where a clear sponsor comes in. This person needs to provide ‘air cover’, needs to help the intrepreneur to navigate through the obstacles thrown up within the parent organisation and ensure there is always a high level of trust as the decisions and progress are being made. It becomes more reliant on relationships, not processes being put into place. The job and the relationships need constant engagement.

The shared belief is based on two essential points; as innovation is a discovery process the people involved in finding the solutions are as equal to the ideas they are pursuing. It is toughest at times of setback or failure; it is being agile enough to deal with ambiguity, uncertainty and making a change, even when change is painful. It is about dealing with measured risk and returns.

So to intrapreneurially tango you have to have a clear mandate

1. To ensure the team has degrees of freedom to create, design and innovate
2. The mandate that they can question and challenge the existing mould to achieve success
3. Knowing the break points to being commercially courageous against being foolhardy, to know the confines of risk but the chance to grab a real opportunity
4. To find the ways to keep all involved energised, incentivised and focused on the prize, the opportunities and the contribution to the goals
5. To keep informing, to make the work transparent and open for others to contribute, help and support.
6. Knowing the difference between timely updates and keeping the head down just that little longer as the breakthrough ‘ahh’ is just around the corner
7. Design in consciously the methods and ways the organisation sees’s the value and the alignment
8. Be constantly aware that performance will be judged, more than likely under a harsher spotlight than for others and recognise what you are working on is commercially critical and decisions will often be based on pragmatic, rather than opportunist or idealistic criteria. Live with it as part and parcel of the job.
9. Consciously stay out of the everyday stream, even challenge if this should go through a typical ‘stage gate’ process as it is really hard for most to understand what makes up a great idea and that it is not a linear process but an iterative one, full of loops, failures, experimentations and revalidating and retesting.
10. Make sure the governance is highly dynamic and agile, trading off the progress of insights, learning, discovery and experimentation in a journey that recognises iterative and flexible decision making that favours adaptation and informing. Making sure there is a right to make mistakes as long as people learn from them and they were contained within the confines of the risk profile.

Intrapreneurship offers the potential of being a vital part of your innovation strategy

As organisations seek growth they need to encourage higher levels of impact. Those that take the route of becoming an intrapreneur share in this desire to build something that has a valuable contribution and impact.

To take on this challenge requires a different mindset and most probably set in a ring-fenced environment. One that conveys flexibility and agility but a need for pace and speed, have higher levels of risk-taking and a clear realisation that failure is part of the learning, a commitment level sometimes beyond ‘belief’ and simply don’t take existing procedures, barriers and established rules of engagement as a reason not to do something, they are true ‘bunker busters’.

In summary

More and more value creation is coming from start-ups, they search for dynamism and points of significant competition, to deliver those more radical, sometimes disruptive solutions. To overcome the built-in risk-adverse and general slowness in large organisations, intrapreneurs need amazing energy to ‘push the obstacle and barriers’ out of the way and still stay ‘fixated’ on the opportunity to bring it to commercial fruition.

Not an easy task but one that is running in parallel to the entrepreneur outside, demonstrating they can deliver on a dream and opportunity that does make a clear contribution and impact.

So are you tapping into this real momentum behind the idea of Intrapreneurship within your organisation? Are you seeking out validated learning?

Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission, I have added to my own site as well.

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The post Exploring the Intrapreneurial Way in Large Organizations first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Three years back I took a view on what to focus upon in my innovation activities to meet client needs, they did seem to make sense at the time.

In many ways, I was fairly happy with the outcome, as many of the places I would put my required but limited resources behind, in providing a depth of understanding, were highly relevant, topical and needed, so were good spaces to offer my thinking, advice and solutions into.

Fast forward these last few years and I often wonder where that focus has actually gone – the focus has been a little ‘bounced’ around but for good reason, I feel, yet, it needs a fresh re-calibrating on my approaches going forward.

Innovation has been rapidly changing and much of its basics have been swallowed up by some defining issues that have raced up to the top of the innovation agenda and it is right to respond to these.

‘Breaking’ practices or new methodologies are much harder to master and advise upon, to determine clear positions and propositions.

This certainly involves investing a lot into getting a certain clarity and perspective, through researching constantly, finding fresh insights, sifting through comparisons, discussing and exploring them, so as to eventually determine the value to specific challenging environments and different organisational maturity levels.

Not only that, it is how to related these to different market conditions, so as to offer thoughtful advice to a broad audience of practitioners and leaders within the corporate world. This advisory world on ‘breaking practices’ is necessary yet often undervalued.

The excitement of ‘breaking innovation’ is in the pioneering, experimenting, discovering, sharing and exchanging. If you are always open to this new thinking, it does enrich and advance innovation understanding and that makes it so valuable but so demanding. Many of them have been utterly enjoyable to explore.

There are so many thinkers, experimenters and explorers contributing, that it makes innovation a terrific space to be part of, it is always evolving and challenging much already established but it means a constant attention to understanding it, sifting through often conflicting voices, translating the new practice that others, time-starved, can then appreciate and can relate too, and then see how they can deploy this into their innovation structures.

The ‘lead- lag’ time is sometimes very long and tortuous to make the necessary changes within organisations and get the necessary ‘buy-in’.

Recently I felt it would be useful to complete a re-assessment to recalibrate my position.

A good starting point was to go back and see what I have been writing about in the past three years. I often write down and capture my initial thinking, then it evolves through different steps, experiences to consolidate my thoughts and work through what I felt was my position on a given subject. It gave me a clearer set of possible outcomes and an essential foundation to build upon.

There is this constant, pressing need to absorb, synthesise and translate what is constantly coming towards us in innovation thinking.  My focus has been to blend this emerging thinking into core aspects of my innovating beliefs as well as contributing to building innovation capabilities, competencies and capacity, my key focal area.

Doesn’t the innovation needle keep shifting constantly?

So increasingly as I looked back I noticed that I have been providing different sets of posts that were more reactive, reflective and responsive. Sometimes taking stock it does surprise you on how the innovation needle had been moved, again and again. This sometimes makes navigation sometimes difficult, you do need clear anchor points.

Often we were missing the constants required to ‘set in place’ innovation, those anchor points, otherwise, we often are simply increasing the layering on, more and more, not giving enough emphasis on how to integrate these into a newly emerging practice of innovation but recognising the essential basics that are constantly needed, irrespective.

The basics of innovation still form around building engagement, leadership, involvement, in constructing a culture, the climate and environment needed, so as to allow innovation to evolve. Then that constant investment in people, networks and relationships, that need to come together and, finally the structures, systems and governance that are flexible enough to make what we work upon as responsive, agile, adaptive, exploitive and exploratory, to end up with great new ideas, things and finally, winning successful concepts.

The shifts taking place around innovation have been significant in their impact

The shifts taking place has been hugely shaped in how digital transformation continues to grow in its importance. how it is influencing much that is surrounding innovation, as it continues to disrupt in faster, demanding ways, where it deconstructs and then we need to reconstruct our innovation thinking so as to gain from this transformation occurring all around us.

Also, there is this growing concern, actually it never went away,  perhaps more enforced than ever today, over the issue of ‘risk and return’ as innovation becomes increasingly complex. As we push to increase the need to push for breaking out of many of our incremental innovation mindsets to tap into real growth opportunities, the pressures continue to build. More help is needed here to make these more of a robust risk / return structure that ‘accounts’ for all the uncertainty in new innovation development.

We seem to be stumbling towards breaking out our innovation activity in more radical, distinctive and adaptive ways. We are certainly treating innovation differently, depending on the sense of opportunity and the desire to work towards the solutions these need. You see progress but it still seems maddeningly slow as dedicated innovation resources are still very ‘thin’ on the ground.

Other real changing forces influencing innovation

The other real forces of innovation change in this relatively short period, have come from a greater explosion of Lean Management principles and incorporating Design thinking into our work. Both being rapidly embraced within our organisations, large and small. How these are fully integrated remains a challenge for most.

Then you have the emergence of platform and ecosystems to build around, the continued onward movement of crowdsourcing and all the variations (or derivation’s) of ‘crowd’ and co-creation’, combined with all the ramifications of the network and relationship building effect we need to leverage. It is this ‘raw’ power of technology that is transforming much,

It is this ‘raw’ power of technology, pushing the flow of knowledge and exploiting the different social mediums that are swirling around us, with many suggested designs and frameworks, that need deeper capture and translation to extract new value.

We all need to think through the value of the pivot, prototype, the constructing of minimal viable products  and rapid experiment and design. Then we have the growing value of experimental labs and establishing ‘pockets’ of entrepreneurs-in-residence, both have increased in focus.  We are learning faster, shutting down what does not work as we go, adapting faster than before our innovation concepts, by being engaged and constantly informed by customer needs.

It has moved well beyond the “how” into the “what, why and where”. The “when” still is subjected to different levels of impatience it still seems. Speed is dominating at present then “Scale” and  the constant worries over the”Execution” of the new value proposition.

Reflecting on all of this – so what does this all mean? Reacting to this in new framing ways.

Within my numerous posts responding to breaking practices, I have wanted to capture the changes occurring. What is clear, we are seeing a growing momentum towards more ‘collective’ agility, higher fluidity,  adaptive enterprises with a growing mantra of adjusting, exploring and quickly responding, to the needs seen in rapidly changing markets and equally across our shifting customer base, to service present and future needs, bringing together a growing interplay around innovation, offering a fluidity in its perspective.

This we have termed the new interplay surrounding innovation and centres around the interplay in three essential change points we need to focus upon. I attempted to capture these initially in this post a visual of nine primary components as the framing point to gather around. The final point of change in emphasis has been on measuring innovation, we need to shift to successful and ultimate outcomes and rethink our measures, in my view, on a new innovation balance sheet thinking.

There has certainly been a lot of innovation change, requiring fresh thinking and this has been the main reason why I have responded accordingly over the past few years.

Even with all this advancement in innovation, you do have to stop and ask are we just layering on more content, more complexity than organisations can honestly cope with?

Are we any clearer about what we do and why and how and where we do it?

We often skip over the basics, ignore that many that need to understand innovation within our organisations fail to understand its parts, its process and its different timing. We still lack a common language of understanding and this is still holding us back. In many ways, it is ‘freezing’ much to move innovation forward strategically.

I feel the most important contribution to building a common framework of understanding and through this, a common language has been in the work Jeffrey Philips of Ovo Innovation and I collaborated upon. This has been in determining the importance of alignment between innovation and the strategy of the business and formulating an approach that engages the leadership into establishing the vital innovation connections needed to be put into place. This we called the Executive Innovation Work Mat and makes the critical connections required for innovation to have a clear corporate identity and offer the conditions to build and thrive from this framework.

Our continued failure to manage risk correctly for innovative concepts

Then, the one really big elephant always rumbling around in the board room is how do we manage risk. Risk management for innovation is still a really uncomfortable area and we often fail to appreciate the ‘risk differences’ and due to this, many promising ideas for innovation investigation or progress get ‘canned’ because it is hard to make the returns, in our obsession with hard numbers, especially in the early stages, to meet the corporate hurdle rates. The risk management for innovation needs urgently addressing in far more imaginative ways, to allow for greater innovation activity and exploration to contribute into a greater growth phase than we currently are struggling to provide.

Do we still have a rotten innovation core? Possibly…….I think yes, well, it is still immature.

It is clear innovation is constantly advancing, yet and this is my reflective thought here, it can have countless layers of fresh paint but if the basic foundation is not solid, it only hides the truth underneath, one that needs fundamental addressing that innovation has a rotten core until you peel away these layers and fix the basics.

Fixing the basics comes back to much within my initial focal points that I worked through some years back. The trouble is I do so often get worried that a reoccurring theme gets a little, dare I say it, boring.

Yet if we do not fix the foundations it might seem boring to keep going back to resolve these but the fundamentals of anything, including innovation, is getting these built on a solid platform, otherwise, it becomes a very expensive vanity ride for many. So should I feel guilty, worried or concerned by continually reverting back?

The attraction of riding the new wave

Like most caught up in innovation I do get often caught up in the wave of new innovation, actually, I love it, it keeps the passion burning brightly in discovery, curiosity and intrigue, in learning, experimenting and exploring, as these are often the clients need to understand and evaluate against.

Yet it does seem to me many innovators within the business organisation do simply miss the basics within their own thinking or organisation and fail to fix these. They keep moving on, restless, wandering the innovation plains looking for these new feeding grounds but are they just feeding themselves, or actually failing badly in feeding all those ‘left on the reservation’ that make up the larger organisation? Not securing their futures by sustaining the innovation forces, seeing innovation as their personal adventure and not a sustaining organisational one?

Those that do pay attention to the basics in innovation and its management become so much better placed to be the disruptors. Why, simply because they have their people’s engagement and identification as central to their innovation activity, they know the basics, they have experimented and learnt, they make the connections, they get it, work it and shape it. Just like the potter at a wheel, innovation is like clay, temperamental; it has a tricky relationship of the shaping, defining, applying lots of practice to get just right with plenty of practice and some ‘learning’ from failure.

So am I cresting or riding the waves? What is the difference?

So perhaps many of my past messages or focal points are as relevant today as when I drew them up, yet as we continue to introduction improved methods, different approaches and more adaptable and flexible practices, my biggest fear becomes an increasing reality that many executives are simply not any clearer on how to manage their innovation.

Cris Beswick founder of thefutureshapers, put it nicely to me a couple of weeks back: “because the basics around innovation are not common knowledge so senior teams are somewhat paralysed in terms of being able to move forward strategically, despite the need”

It can be a dangerous assumption that we ‘think’  innovation is well understood, often it is not, it continues to be a serious source of frustration and disappointment, at all levels. This ‘fixing the basics’ still needs a clear focus to resolve, to forge a pathway for others to understand. It needs a constant balance between extolling the old, exploring the new. Blending practice.

I hope I can keep attempting this translating and embedding innovation practice, I keep trying, yet it is for other people to judge if this has paying value to their innovation understanding. I believe it does.

* This post was updated and amended on 12th July 2016.

The post Are you having fun riding the innovation waves? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We need to increasingly deliver better end results; as more distinctive, bolder and creative, delivering greater value to our customers’ needs. Can we change our thinking to achieve this?

Let me offer some of my thoughts on why we need to reinvent our innovation management.

The power of technology, software and the use of the cloud is combining in new powerful ways. We are looking for greater data capture and analytics and this is offering us a very different set of options than in the past. The framing of the innovation potential has to be altered. Altered in different products. services and business models. But will it?

Yet many organisations still stay locked into their established ways, systems and structures. Many organisations are failing to renew themselves. Innovation seems to be trapped in the past, we need a new framing to break it out and make it more dynamic and adaptive to meeting constantly changing needs.

Innovation needs to become far more responsive and dynamic, to respond with imagination and intent of purpose.

To achieve this innovation requires a greater organisational engagement than ever before. It needs mobilising differently, in radically different ways; to capture different opportunities in more agile, adaptive and shaping ways.

Often we look at innovation through a single lens but it does need to accommodate different dimensions that can be exploratory or exploitive, we need to both widen the aperture of the lens and simultaneously change lens to view things differently.

We certainly need far more “mission-orientated” innovation, that is both converging and synergistic, strategically aligned, building on the back of past work and ‘sunk’ investment but equally, pushing out in new ways. Innovation should be constantly renewed and refreshed, it needs investments for its future.

Rapidly changing market conditions are challenging us more

Our portfolio of innovation offerings is facing different market conditions. Some of our products and services are in stable and predictable market conditions, others are being subjected to significant change, caused by technology, adapting to new emerging trends or changing demands and shifting regulations. All of these can challenge the existing business and we need to respond in different ways and at different speeds.

This also seems a time where there is increasing opportunity to shape industry evolutions through multiple ways and use of the many technology enablers, in exploring new relationships, investing in networks and platforms to collaborate and extend beyond our own restricted abilities. All of this requires a greater adaptive and shaping capability. For this, we need a far greater innovation translation canopy to explore. A new framework. Actually ‘multiple’ frameworks.

Applying The Strategy Palette to our Innovation Needs

Initially provided by BCG as a strategy palette, I have set about adopting this framework to innovation.

I initially wrote in “Shining a powerful innovation light into the Corporate board rooms” about the application and value of this frame differently. The difference is that mine is an Innovation Strategic Palette by applying its use in developing the innovation strategic content that  boardrooms need to build better, clearer and far more comprehensive innovation strategies.

We can apply this to change our innovation thinking, to make it more versatile to what we need from our innovation today. It can open up our thinking and allow us to gain a revised understanding of how innovation can be mobilised in different ways.

By applying this framework through four archetypes alternatives, you can  see emerging different design options to innovation. Choices that can provide the catalyst that can drive innovation’s renewal. It really can be used as a problem recognition diagnostic tool or a starting point for innovation opportunity dialogues .

We are in need of finding innovation frameworks that can guide, seize and respond to emerging opportunities quicker, at today’s new innovation speed in agile ways. Exploring this palette framework has to be valuable, to offer a new flexible approach to dealing with these multiple forces of upheaval and threat with clear intent and design in response.

Why this call for innovation renewal? Why do we need to re-think our approach to innovation?

Firstly the need for consistent renewal

We need to constantly renew within ourselves, that seem a constant today and our innovation efforts need a serious renewal for many reasons. We are facing unprecedented challenges, complexities and competition. We are mostly facing sluggish growth and find an increasing new competition from unexpected sources, looking to disrupt established markets, probing to change the game, innovation has an urgent need to adjust to a whole new set of different business dynamics.

Where and when do we invest, why and how? The need for different handling and thinking

Knowing when and where to invest in an innovation renewal and organising for it is a tough call. It tends to fly in the face of excepted practices, based on constantly attempting to improve the efficiencies and effectiveness of the processes. Often innovation discovery is unique, the pursuit of bringing innovation from discovery through to commercialization has many unknowns and inconsistencies of practices.

Innovation and its management are hard to align into much of the established practices and this is one of its toughest tests; to be treated differently not attempted to be drawn into other organizational activity by applying a mixture of routines and linear handoff, it needs mobilizing in different ways, to capture different opportunities in more agile, adaptive and shaping ways.

Innovation needs a different handling, more adaptive, more discovery-orientated, more exploratory, testing and probing to validate concepts and ideas.

Addressing the changing market conditions through different innovation design.

Why I think this BCG strategic palette has it ‘bang on’ is in the fact they recognize that business environments have three discernible dimensions: predictability and how you can forecast it, malleability and how you shape it, alone or in collaborative ways, and the harshness of the existing market conditions and how you set about surviving this. It is how you set about executing innovation outcomes within these three dimensions will give that greater distinctive need to the design and execution of your innovation solutions. Just thinking about the prevailing conditions can alter perceptions.

The framing of our innovation does have serious strategic consequences.

Those that are honest enough to admit that what they have achieved to-date in innovation activity is just not going to ‘cut it’ for the future, will be making a  very ‘tough’ call but it might be one of the best ones they are about to make. It opens up the thinking to let alternatives in.

I think we all need to constantly look at a renewal of innovation as essential in our thinking, as the conditions we operate within are more volatile than ever before. Over shorter times many things have evolved, suddenly changed, altered and moved on. So by not constantly refreshing we have allowed systems and tools to stay stuck in the past, we stay ‘bound’ to innovation in a current format often far too long. We need to shake out the cobwebs and renew ourselves.

The innovation spirit needs rethinking by taking a more versatile and shaping approach

We fail to constantly refresh and challenge our understanding. We need not just to adjust to our goals but more importantly to adjust from our knowledge of understanding of how we are managing innovation. We simply do need new and different framing mechanisms to be applied constantly as we set about innovation design if we believe in growth and fresh value creation.

It takes a real innovation zeal to renew, thinking this through in different new ways. Renewing innovation needs recognition. Focusing on renewal offers much. Don’t just rip-up or simply dispose of what we have, think through what renewing can give us in improved solutions, often at much lower cost and customer acceptance but most critically to decide and balance the different speeds and challenges innovation development has. Innovation and its management need to be thought through afresh.

Framing our thinking towards our future needs of innovation relates to the conditions we face today and can possibly foresee coming towards us. These conditions of ‘being’ predictable and unpredictable’ begins to determine the type of innovation approach to take.

We need to be fluid, flexible and have different mindsets of thinking innovation.

The approach we take is offering up this mix of the classical, the visionary, the adaptive and shaping and from these first we need to decide the tools, frameworks, resources, structures and systems that best work in each case, the what is applicable to bring to fruition different ideas within each of these dimensions offered in the palette.

We also need to recognise that innovation is different each time, for each opportunity, where it needs resourcing and managing differently. This  BCG strategic palette approach can offer a framework that does offer us a broader variety of options in our innovation thinking.

We also need to recognise that innovation is different each time, for each opportunity, where it needs resourcing and managing differently. This  BCG strategic palette approach can offer a framework that does offer us a broader variety of options in our innovation thinking.

Shifting our thinking

We must move away from a one-size fit all mentality, one where all innovation ‘chugs’ along, within the same process and pipeline. At present this copnstraining approach is killing so much of the potential within innovation. How can all those distinctive, radical and breakthrough concepts, all trying to be measured, squeezed and determined by one processing lens of innovation, all being constrained by traditional thinking, never ever seeing the light of day, as commercial outcomes because we ‘kill them off’?

Exploring different framing mechanisms are necessary

We not only need to apply the three horizons thinking for building and allocating our innovation to different time horizons but I would suggest we need to apply this BCG palette approach for our innovation approaches.

We need to break out of this current mindset trap of one-dimensional thinking, into that dual one of wanting to be simultaneously exploring and exploiting, managing the known and seeking out answers to the unknowns, keeping a balance between today’s business and those concepts that can grow for our future and that will need constant renewal, questioning and evaluation.

We do need new framing mechanisms to be applied to our innovation design and I just feel this palette frame can make a useful contribution as we apply different thinking to redesigning innovation in need of this renewal.

The post Future Innovation demands a different approach first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

If we ‘subject’ all of our innovation thinking to go through the same process we lose so much. How can you treat incremental innovation in the same way as radical or breakthrough innovation? You need to apply a completely different thinking and approach to the type of innovation you are thinking through. You must be prepared to abandon established thinking if it is not resolving the problems you are facing.

Beginning any journey is never easy, you stumble a little until you find a certain rhythm

I wanted to start somewhere and it is breaking our existing mentality of how we manage innovation as the first critical point to challenge. Due to this has become a much longer post than I would like and I apologize for that but I wanted to get the mentality issue well ‘aired’ and I needed to cover off a number of bases to frame this.

Funnily enough as I was thinking how to begin I came across two short verses from the Bible, both from Matthew 9.16 & 9.17. and wanting to start here on why we should be Shining a powerful innovation light into the Corporate Boardrooms. It might be a strange place to start for many, yet it somehow allows me to begin my journey.

“No one puts new wine into old wineskins. For the wine would burst the wineskins, and the wine and the skins would both be lost. New wine calls for new wineskins.” – I believe we need to find a new framing position for innovation as the disruptive forces and challenges we face today are growing and call for new ways of managing.

“No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. Otherwise, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse.” – We have been renovating our innovation process until it becomes unrecognizable by all the patches we have been applying and is it really providing the results we want?

Innovation today disappoints

We are not achieving the impact from all our innovation endeavors that we should. There is a time to radically redesign our innovation. We need to shift our thinking as innovation is providing disappointing returns and we are in urgent need to find a new re-framing position of the organization’s innovation engagement.

Innovation needs to become far more responsive and dynamic, to respond with imagination and intent of purpose. To achieve this innovation requires a greater organizational engagement than ever before. It needs mobilizing differently, in radically different ways; so as to capture different opportunities in more agile, adaptive and shaping ways

If we do need to re-present innovation to our corporate boards to engage in more, we need to offer them a compelling set of arguments on why innovation needs a fundamental rethink, a renewed focus on building the capabilities, competences and capacities that are possible if you engage in a comprehensive innovation management.

Shifting the innovation mindset, resolving a present day dilemma

I’ve written about this need for fluidity and taken this part to frame this post

“Stability and fluidity – how can both work alongside each other? They are opposites yet we need both to thrive in today’s world. Many theorists have suggested, of having in place the ‘ambidextrous organization.’ This would need organizations to design their organizations in their structures, people and processes to either be focused on ‘being efficient’ or being ‘change orientated’. An increased level of duality. The mindset of exploiting or exploring but can we have both, I certainly think so, it mostly depends on what we are about to do to get this mental picture of which frame of thinking should dominate but not be exclusive.

I have been drawn to this ‘dual’ system of ambidextrous as it helps resolve one of the consistent stumbling blocks for innovation to ‘take hold’ and evolve. Innovation is constantly fluid, needing to be adaptive as we learn and adjust to new learning and this is constantly requiring a very change orientated approach. Often innovation comes up against a rigid system and for many “just seems not to fit”

Innovation struggles as it often remains outside the prevailing system. Innovation constantly challenges against the dominant mindset within organizations, who like the idea of innovation but are mostly measured to drive efficiency and effectiveness, keeping highly focused on the short-term performance as their role, reward, advancement and key to ongoing career success, so innovation ‘sits outside’ their domain of focus”

Something needs to change if innovation is really important.

We innovators need a new model of change, for at least eight important reasons I can initially think of:

1. As innovators we aren’t simply responding to external change, we are creating change, both for customers and for our companies and markets. (inside, proactive change vs external, reactive).
2. External change is far more unpredictable, in global markets new threats emerge from anywhere, at any time and often delivered in totally unexpected ways, through new business models that totally cut through and disrupt the existing positions, they can render the existing obsolete in seemingly rapid time, irrespective of the efforts to respond as they have discovered the unmet need to deliver solutions to it.
3. The pace and nature of change isn’t slowing, but is accelerating and will continue to accelerate. (increasing pace, frequency and amplitude of change). Organizations need to pick up the pace, learn to accept a greater risk, experimentation and rapid adjustment on the new knowledge flowing in to build the final outcome to the needs of the market / customer.
4. Sudden evolving markets makes everything needing to be ‘super’ responsive by existing players, to the sudden realization they have missed opportunities, Many existing organizations cannot cope and alter with this demand for agility, flexibility and responsiveness. They need to (re)learn this and build it into their systems and often this realization comes too late. Some industries have been undertaking a responsive approach, for example in their supply chain thinking. Think Zara, the Spanish clothing retailer and how it changed the game.
5. As often demonstrated, most innovation has the potential to be business model innovation, which will require change. (As more innovation becomes focused on business model innovation, this will create even more change).
6. We recognize that change is no longer an occasional threat but a constant companion (shift from the idea of change as a threat to developing an ongoing change capacity as a competitive advantage).
7. The idea that companies can achieve a protected steady state where change won’t affect them doesn’t seem to apply anymore (long periods of stasis, or standing still are no longer possible. Must be able to change/evolve constantly).
8. We need to think of change as a capability that we constantly deploy, rather than a threat we typically avoid. (Need to develop change as a capability, to build skills, reduce barriers).

We need to ask of ourselves if we recognize our need to change

How can we establish Innovation as the vital link to a process of change and strategic direction options, that lifts the debates of managing today’s business by linking it into the future and then turning this thinking into a series of plausible and coherent set of activities?

How can we focus the energy around the boardroom table on to this linking the future work to the shape and the organization’s needs, making the growing innovation debate as strategic as it can be?

Four articles that help shape the change in mindset making it far more of a dual one.

For a start I would recommend you read the four articles I have summarized in my own way below,  to provide a greater depth of understanding in some of our starting points of changing the existing mindset within the boardroom. Here is my brief summaries of these, partly re-affirming but extending thinking to ’embrace’ these:

Two articles are from Scott Anthony or his Innosight team or in collaborations.

Firstly, Two Routes to Resilience

“Sooner or later, your company will probably need to transform itself in response to market shifts, ground breaking technologies, or disruptive start-ups”. Read about this here

“First, major transformations need to be two different efforts happening in parallel. “Transformation A” should re-position the core business, adapting its current business model to the altered marketplace. “Transformation B” should create a separate, disruptive business to develop the innovations that will become the source of future growth.

Second, the key to making both transformations work is to establish a new organizational process we call a “capabilities exchange,” through which the parallel efforts can share select resources without changing the mission or operations of either”

Dividing the effort in two allows leaders to develop a new strategy for the core that doesn’t need to make up for all the business lost to disruption”

Secondly, What Do You Really Mean by Business “Transformation”?

“When executives say transformation what do they really mean? Often, the word confuses three fundamentally different categories of effort”. Read the article here

“The first is operational, or doing what you are currently doing, better, faster, or cheaper. Many companies that are “going digital” fit in this category — they are using new technologies to solve old problems.

The next category of usage focuses on the operational model. Also called core transformation, this involves doing what you are currently doing in a fundamentally different way.

The final usage, and the one that has the most promise and peril, is strategic. This is transformation with a capital “T” because it involves changing the very essence of a company. Liquid to gas, lead to gold”

Defining what leaders mean when they drop the word transformation matters, because these different classes of efforts need to be measured and managed in vastly different ways.”

Two further articles are from Ralph-Christian Ohr

Ralph writes under his blog http://integrative-innovation.net/

The first is “A Model for Integrative Innovation Management”

In his view sustainable successful innovation management systems in organizations are required to be based on a couple of essential premises – all of which can be considered necessary conditions. Read his article here

Innovation management follows a balanced portfolio approach. The entire innovation portfolio is divided into exploitation-oriented and exploration-oriented innovation initiatives, where following characterizations hold:

Exploitation-oriented initiatives are related to running core business by executing and enhancing existing business models or technological capabilities. The primary direction of impact is value capturing (commercialization). Examples: Product, service or process innovation, portfolio extension, innovation of selected business model components (e.g. channel or operations), market research.

Exploration-oriented initiatives are related to developing future business by searching for novel, and often disruptive, business models or technological capabilities. The primary direction of impact is value creation (configuration). Examples: Business model development, platform/ecosystem innovation, basic technology research & development, startup engagement, innovation intelligence.

Ralph and I share the belief that the three horizons is a distinct playground for innovation initiatives

Exploration- and exploitation-oriented innovation initiatives can be assigned to three strategic horizons. As outlined below, the horizons address different proximity to the core business with regard to business model or technological capabilities – and therefore indirectly time scale. The horizons’ strategic objectives can be put in a nutshell:

H1 – Core: Optimization of existing business models and technologies, addressing of existing markets

H2 – Growth: Acceleration and scaling of new business models and technologies, adaptation of existing business models

H3 – Future: Discovery and validation of new business models and technologies, shaping of future markets

A lot of my own work goes into developing the understanding, usage and practice of working with the three horizon methodology. Ralph and I share a lot on this as core to a way forward. Here is my White Paper and short presentation opener to this 3H thinking to capture, translate and combine the innovation for today and leading towards the future.

Ralph’s second article is equally making the Case for Dual Innovation

This is revisiting the need for a higher level of organizational ambidexterity to be built into the organization. So often something is dismissed without it being fully worked through. Ralph puts up the case for revisiting “dual innovation” equally suggested within the Innosight articles. Read his article here.

“In the past, systematic dual innovation management approaches have often been discounted due to falling short of expectations or lacking prevalence across the sum of companies. Both reasons, however, don’t necessarily imply the basic concept is inappropriate or even wrong”

“Adequate buy-in on part of executive/senior management and proper implementation of these approaches are mandatory prerequisites in order to make them live up to their potential and – as a consequence – increasingly trusted and applied. The above studies clearly reveal: Organizational ambidexterity proves to be a necessary condition for outstanding corporate innovation capability. Company boards may ignore it at their peril.”

The need is for us to get thinking in ‘dual’ minds for ‘greater’ innovation delivery.

Exploitation  <=> core transformation, i.e. doing what you are currently doing in a fundamentally different way

Exploration <=> strategic transformation, i.e. changing the very essence of a company

The thinking in dual ways is a really important part of bringing innovation thinking into the boardroom, framing this through a three horizon approach that can provide a common language, a different thinking mindset and build future discussions in appropriate time horizons and impact assessments. Also take a read of “Mapping innovation across the three horizons” to link this powerful concept into any board rooms thinking over the present and future for placing different innovation activities.

Dogma, mindsets and conflicts often dominate our boardrooms

I wrote about Lingering dogma, fixed mindsets and conflicting needs and wrote at the end “I can’t promise it can stop all the unhealthy debates around innovation in the boardroom by adopting the Three Horizon framework. What it might change is the perspective of where to focus the expertise and energy to make innovation far more the strategic bedrock, that organizations are looking to achieve, the link towards a healthier future. It’s not personal any more, its considering options in a future-orientated way for their business, to find better ways to thrive not just survive”

In summary, as the first post of why innovation must reside in the boardroom

The first thinking ‘out loud’ ( a long one I must admit) of moving innovating thinking far more into the corporate boardroom comes from the need to establish a “thinking mindset” within our boardrooms, a duality of mindset. One where they ‘collectively’ within the boardroom needs to think in dual ways, exploring and exploiting, to establish distinct types of transformation efforts, and innovation initiatives, combined with the use and application of embracing the three horizons, this becomes the first group of thinking for “shining innovation into the corporate boardrooms”.

Footnote: Where I seem to be heading is in my intent of making innovation itself a transformational journey, perhaps even a “renaissance” as we all are facing and needing to tackle all the disruptive forces around us.

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The post Establishing a new mentality for innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

This seems an appropriate time to begin to rethink and explain innovation, partly in this need to fight these “immune systems” in fresh ways and partly to redrawn, re-frame and renew the value of innovation; in how it can help organizations going forward in very volatile times.

So let’s shine some light on new ways or even recognized paths for innovation to re-enter the thinking within our corporate boardrooms, in different ways that might resonate more in these more ‘dynamic’ times.

I like this organizing framework shown above, it can  allow us to gain a revised understanding of how innovation can be mobilized in different ways, to give value in dealing with these different forces to help move you towards a growing level of renewal.

So I want to begin a series of posts around positioning innovation frameworks, tools or approaches that build the boardroom “innovation toolkit” to deal in both the predictive and unpredictive environments. The suggestions that will be offered are designed to help tackle the disruptive forces swirling around the business that are rising, increasing the uncertainties to future invest. It is attempting to address the concerns on how to organize the “forces of innovation” to combat them, to raise the confidence level in the boardroom to ’embrace’ innovation far more than seemingly the case today.

Firstly the background to this attempt to re-frame the innovation value proposition.

What prompts this has been a spate of recent reports raising concerns largely about innovation uncertainty in our boardrooms. This made me draw back and reflect, now it is time to re-frame and renew the message of innovation and its management..

The three previous posts that reflected this ‘dark period’ for innovation come out of different reports. My posts are here, here, and here. I did got fairly emotional in firstly reading the reports, and then in these three reviews – my dark period but rightly so, I believe.

The story so far if you have not read my previous three posts

The case has been made that our boards are risk-adverse, experimentally shy and digitally inept. They are struggling to adjust to the disruptive forces attacking the core of their businesses.Can that be challenged and certainly changed?

Boards feel their organizations are slow to respond, far from agile and flexible, delivering up a series of poor levels of innovation performance in the solutions to grow the business. Our boards are equally not encouraged to change the business models and offer a new way forward, to get these significant threats ‘contained’ in different ways.  In many ways innovation is moving backwards due to a risk-adverse approach, missing numerous opportunities, or just not wanting to learn from past mistakes.

You might feel this has a level of abdication and quiet acceptance to it, that the inevitable is coming towards them at higher speeds and complexity than they can ever imagine. This has left them poorly equipped to manage this growing set of disrupting forces in ways they have been used too, it is creating a high level of uncertainty and uneven attempts to undertake the changes necessary. Increasingly this management rigidity within the present management style, continues to favor efficiency and effectiveness through repeating practices, processes and highly structured systems. Those are designed to extract the maximum from constantly reducing the minimum needed to get the job done.

Well you are right, many of our boards are simply incapable to think beyond their past management experiences, one that is focusing on leveraging a return for each quarter to yield ever-improving short-term results, pushing  ‘incentives’ that everyone is encouraged to sign up too, for supporting this approach and their participation gets rewarded. Yet it can be also so different, perhaps liberating if they took a different tack.

Heading towards a promised land through innovation is certainly possible

Can we lead them out of this ‘dead end’ they seem to have found themselves in, a cul-de-sac,one they continue to drive along as this cost-driven, short-term road? Yet it can be very different, pursuing a more open freeway or highway seeking out growth, if you allow imagination, beliefs, determination and character to find that alternative pathway by having that real desire to make all the changes necessary, and there are many, let’s be clear upfront.

It is a journey not for the weak-willed or one undertaken half-halfheartedly but with real innovation intent and purpose.Each journey is unique but full of commonalities and these need to be revisited or explored in fresh ways. Embracing innovation fully can propel you forward, in often many unexpected ways but also in some bold and thoughtful ones.

So where do we start?

So in a series of blog-posts, I want to “shine innovation into the corporate boardrooms,” I am hopefully offering a way forward for those time-starved or presently not as well-equipped to pull this innovation structure together into a more cohesive ‘whole’ that can raise their confidence in innovation and grow in their engagement to this emerging discipline.

The framework here, I will be breaking down in my own innovative way, as my approach to strategic innovation thinking. This is different from the way that BCG is suggesting using this framework although their title “Your strategy needs a strategy” certainly brought me to their Strategy Palette as my framing concept.

The difference is that mine is an Innovation Strategic Palette by applying its use in developing the innovation strategic content that  boardrooms require to build better, clearer and far more comprehensive innovation strategies. So I am adapting it specifically to innovation and the outcome is through these four archetypes that is leading to ‘arriving’ at renewal, for a greater chance of survival in today’s more disruptive world.

This frame will determine most of the content of the posts going forward.

The management of innovation needs organizing.

The intent of applying this innovation palette is to encourage, through the proper management of innovation, to provide and convince the boards’ they can develop a greater appetite for growth, even in increasingly disruptive times. Innovation should have a very high strategic importance on the board’s agenda, I am hopefully this contribution can help.

We need to change the thinking around the present attitudes to innovation engagement at boardroom level, in changing the risk profiles and tolerance of failure. The options to innovation should be made up of a healthy mix of extending the existing business, strengthening and extracting from this core, to find the time and resources so as to provide a greater strategic intent to find more distinctive innovations, that give a confidence in the future, as well as be fully supportive, provide encouragement and determined commitment to explore the future, where more radical and breakthrough innovation potential ‘resides.’

From what I have seen and read there seems a clear need to address the skill-set at board level to handle innovation, to equate to digital disruption and technology differently. The real urgency is to encourage board members to act far more proactively through managing innovation, to evolve and utilize a Boardroom innovation toolkit that can be built.

The business world is far more risky today, far more complex, we are becoming more failure tolerant or ultra defensive. Innovation thrives in the unknown and undiscovered innovation territory, waiting to be explored and exploited.

Noble aim, willing intent. Lets see if I can make a dent in the innovation universe for corporate leaders.

It is being equipped with the right toolkit of innovation management that  perhaps board members can then start seeing themselves as new business development leaders, that has innovation at the heart of their future decisions.

The post Shining a powerful innovation light into the Corporate Boardrooms first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

One where it is offering up a healthy mix of rain, stronger sun, a little flurry of snow and some heavy wind too.

It can constantly confuse us as it can rapidly alter within the same 24 hours to often keep the heating on, when it should be switched off and visa-versa. It can be an uncomfortable month of adjusting constantly, second guessing of what might be ahead.

On the innovation front I have been experiencing the same feeling of adjusting to uncomfortable days.

First, I was reviewing a report from Accenture, on how US big business was treating their innovation as more left to chance in their report, with my summary here on cloudy execution, my snakes and ladders. This ‘rocked’ some of my beliefs, ones where I thought we actually were making the progress on innovation understanding. It seems this is not the case, we are going backwards and then my month got suddenly worse from a report from Deloittes.

The Deloittes report was on how leadership within Boardrooms under  my”uncharted waters”, was about how our boards are struggling to get their ‘collective heads’ around disruption and how innovation can, or cannot, dig them out of the threats they are facing. They are being disrupted constantly across the business. They are caught between fear and uncertainty on what to do and clearly that is not a comfortable place to be.

Both reports, as I was reviewing them, left me a little depressed to say the least and it just continues…..like the April weather…. leaving me totally uncertain and then what pops up….

Adding to this innovation reporting mix- Innosight provides a further angst report.

So a further report, this time from Innosight, throws even more angst into the boardroom, adding further into this mix of fear, caution, grim reading on a lack of innovation commitment facing larger organizations. The report from Innosight is in their Spring Insights, called Corporate Longevity: Turbulence Ahead for Large Organizations it just added more worrying news from my perspective on innovation lack of top level progress.

I again buckled up for a further reading of unpredictable innovation resolutions, just like this April weather, all raining down on us from those not heeding, understanding or changing their thinking. In many boardrooms they are not wanting to tackle in fresh ways the future and work towards embracing all the disrupting forces swirling around at present. They seem to want to hold on and not let go of the past .I’m getting really innovation weary from all this

So three reports I thought “oh no”- the grim reaper is truly upon us.

Innosight’s report starts with “We’re entering a period of heightened volatility for leading companies across a range of industries, with the next ten years shaping up to be the most potentially turbulent in modern history.”

Reap what you do not sow Mr Boardroom member- uncertain futures, badly invested in

So we all know that 50% of the current S&P 500 will be replaced over the next ten years, didn’t we? Well I did from past readings (clever me) but it is never nice to be reminded again. Not because of its reality but because of the leadership we have in place in many of these organizations is in the denial it will happen to them.

That is what is for me so upsetting. They earn Squillions and screw the long term health of the organization totally up as more often the case, because they were not even focusing on any belief of the future, just taking in the rewards for the immediate present. They could have done something about it but seem incapable to show the level of leadership to achieve this, just why, why is that?

With so much additional disruption coming from technologies, from start-ups, from intense M&A activities and having this ‘being overtaken’ by more agile, quicker growing companies just piles on the pressure within the boardroom but ignoring its threat as “it will not happen to me” without the boldness, decisiveness and intent to reinvent the organization to catch the different ‘waves’ of opportunity is sometimes bordering on criminal, well for me- what about you?.

Innosight in this report has a great passage

“Viewed as a larger picture, the lifespan chart serves as a barometer for marketplace change. And the stakes couldn’t be higher. Shrinking lifespans are in part driven by a complex combination of technology shifts and economic shocks, some of which are beyond the control of corporate leaders. But frequently, companies miss opportunities to adapt or take advantage of change. For example, they continue to apply existing business models to new markets, fail to respond to disruptive competitors in low-profit segments, or fail to adequately envision and invest in new growth areas, which in some cases take a decade to pay off”.

This sums it up pretty well for me. We have failures all around us going on due to this lack of imagination, a poor coherent longer-term vision, a lack of confidence to achieve any form of transformation lies within the organization and so it becomes incapable to undertake the transformation that it needed to undertake, due to continually miss the opportunities offered to evolve.

Leadership still lacks real innovation commitment, the linkage to growth, to fending off disruption, of tuning into current and future needs, the message of embracing it has simply not got through to those within the boardrooms; one that the comprehensive management of innovation can offer significant improvements on present performance and they need to fully take hold of it, to learn and leverage, to explore and exploit, in imaginative and breakthrough ways.

Innovation can offer a pathway out of the existing position that many organizations are facing, ones of poor growth, limited sustainability and growing erosion of their existing market positions, often spiraling down, with cutting existing costs seen as the only option. It can be so very different if they wanted to fully engage with innovation. Others are reaping the rewards of their own inabilities in the boardroom to commit the time needed to practice innovation.

The question is “will it change?” If so how, why and when- not with these answers.

The Innosight report points out in the organizations they surveyed of 91 companies with revenue greater than $1 billion across more than 20 industries across the world, the shocking news  that only 24% have a growth strategy with a time horizon of beyond five years, 16.5% report having no formal growth strategy or a growth plan at all as they are seemingly “too busy executing”, “really don’t have time to focus on it” or “we don’t have a good process for formulating a growth strategy that we are confident about”

Then you get the “but of course we are committed to long-term innovation” but it is our “day-to-day decisions that undermine our stated strategy to change” Oh for heavens sake can this really go on? To make substantial change when you are facing the type of change and threats occurring today can easily take up to a decade to fully realize.

So the future continues to be pushed off, growth stays morbid and we resort to simply cutting costs, lowering choice, quality and resources to handle this, we continue to outsource our future to others, who are more than ready to take it on and learn, so as to take your place eventually.

So let the bell toll- let’s say goodbye to 50% of who we know today, you deserve it.

It leaves you utterly sad, even depressed. Innosight offers these thoughts below as a worthwhile thought, when so many of these larger organizations are not heeding or reading about their serious lack of commitment to innovation and the future. They seem apathetic or incapable to comprehend what this eventually means to the future of their organizations.

So Innosight suggests: “Leaders have to confront what might be called tensions, balances, or, even in extreme circumstances, paradoxes. They must optimize today, and discover tomorrow. They must be decisive and bet on moonshots, and defer to experiments. They have to focus, and enable serendipity. They have to leverage the core, and break its constraints”

It seems many just simply do not have the appetite to grow, to look towards the future when their own investment and return is tied mostly to the present.

It just does not seem boards are confident in innovation. There seems a reluctance in wanting to take ownership for innovation, one encouraging and investing more confidently in an evolving/ learning series of experiments to evolve the future of their business in iterative, exploratory ways. It is not a ‘core’ discipline or focal point as innovation continues to have been left to others outside the boardroom. That needs to change.

We are left to judge each company by deciphering ‘the smoke and mirrors’ offered that are claimed to form their “unique” innovation culture, to attempt to determination the staying power and their true belief and undertaking in a future, and make our judgement- mostly it should be yank our money, run like hell, until this future can be well-articulated and well-backed in action.

As companies sadly stick to their historical core as the business, falling to take the risks, invest in the new growth ventures and experiments to build towards a better shot at the future, so I say “just simply go, fade away and leave a puddle as your mess or contribution, and forget the thrill of reinvention and providing a ‘sense of destiny’ and taking pride in exploring more than simply exploiting, often just for your own personal gain”

So Goodbye, many of you in leadership positions, as you do not serve innovation well for its potentially exciting future. You are simply letting down the communities, the stakeholders, your customers, our futures, by not heeding all these ‘darker’ messages coming out of Accenture, Deliotte, Innosight and countless others telling you to change or die!

The “Grim Reaper” is knocking on many boardroom doors. Let him cut away the dead wood and we can all move ahead.

The post No Company deserves to survive with apathy in its future first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The object of the game is to navigate one’s game piece, according to dice rolls, from the start (bottom square) to the finish (top square), helped or hindered by ladders and snakes respectively.

Originally from India the game is a simple race contest based on sheer luck and I am beginning to wonder if we are playing a new version of this with innovation? This is called “bust or boom” or “success or failure” or even “maybe or maybe not,” or even “will we, won’t we.” It just all depends on our luck in rolling the dice, a serendipity with a darker twist that many companies seem to be playing with their innovation capability building.

The game came to mind as I read through a recent survey on Innovation

I have just been reading an Innovation report / survey from Accenture called “Clear Vision, Cloudy Execution” and I really do think we are playing with innovation as a game, it has some really serious implications within it that need more drawing out than possibly offered in my view. We should be getting worried that many bigger companies are losing the innovation game.

Accenture in a survey conducted with 500 US Executives leads with this conclusion:

“US Executives are unrealistic in believing they have the capabilities they need to achieve their bold goals. The truth is that most struggle to generate the returns they seek from their innovation investments”

Yet it seems companies are confident in their innovation performance, awarding themselves high marks as innovators, even rating themselves as very positive in their performance against their (known) competitors. So tell me where is the growth then? Why are our public companies continuing to buy back their shares, shrink their work forces and continue to chase the cheaper investment alternatives of relocating where the tax breaks continue to bolster the returns of short-term thinking?

Accenture in their report details (this opens a PDF file) rightly  points out “confidence is a good thing” but in their experience “that companies that believe they have superior innovation capabilities are less likely to take steps to improve their innovation processes, culture, capabilities and operating models”

Also “that leaders are less likely to appreciate (and explain to management teams) that innovation is a complex discipline that requires diverse approaches“. This is when you are on the ascendancy (often mistakenly) and throwing the dice and progressing up the ladder of my snakes and ladders analogy.

The issue seems to be on not really understanding how they innovate or what is needed to innovate consistently.

The snakes that are all around, according to Accenture, are that companies don’t learn from past mistakes, miss market opportunities and are risk averse. They have badly slipped back on these.

It does seem to have become a “board” game of playing with innovation on a “shall we, shan’t we invest, sustain or allow” what we have gained to slither away as we roll the dice one more time. This time we land on the snake and slid back on our innovation progress from a series of market failures and often start again, often with a change in the innovation leadership.

Before I get ahead of myself let me explain the origin of snakes and ladders  

Referring to Wikipedia: the game snakes and ladders was originally from India. “The game was popular in ancient India by the name Moksha Patam. It was also associated with traditional Hindu philosophy contrasting karma and kama, or destiny and desire.

When the game was brought to England, the Indian virtues and vices were replaced by English ones in hopes of better reflecting Victorian doctrines of morality. Squares of Fulfillment, Grace and Success were accessible by ladders of Thrift, Penitence and Industry and snakes of Indulgence, Disobedience and Indolence caused one to end up in Illness, Disgrace and Poverty. While the Indian version of the game had snakes outnumbering ladders, the English counterpart was more forgiving as it contained each in the same amount.

This concept of equality signifies the cultural ideal that for every sin one commits, there exists another chance at redemption. Have we this same luxury with the management and building of innovation?

The sins we are still committing in the name of innovation pursuit.

The Accenture survey of executives and managers within 500 U.S. companies reveals that six in 10 (60 percent) said their companies do not learn from past mistakes. This is nearly double the 36 percent who admitted to this three years ago when Accenture last conducted a similar survey.

Nearly three-fourths (72 percent) indicate their firm’s often miss opportunities to exploit underdeveloped areas or markets versus 53 percent three years ago.

More than two-thirds (67 percent) believe their companies are risk averse, a large increase from 46 percent revealed in the previous survey.

The survey also shows that 82 percent admit they do not distinguish their innovation approaches between incremental versus large-scale transformational change – meaning they use a single “one-size-fits-all” approach to achieve different goals.

Also most respondents said they have “big” innovation ideas but are missing an organizational “home” with the company. So their ideas often go nowhere.

“A significant gap exists between what U.S. companies want to achieve in the innovation arena versus what they are able to do,” said Adi Alon, managing director, Accenture Strategy.  “They want to innovate yet they need to take different and bolder actions to achieve transformational, major revenue-generating innovation. True innovation requires aggressive changes in technologies, operating models and talent.”

The recognition that the chances of redemption are certainly getting less

Yet also emerging from this survey was this really far more bullish view on disruptive innovation compared to the survey undertaken three years ago.

For instance, 84 percent said they believe innovation is key for their long-term success compared with 67 percent three years ago.

The same percentage of respondents – 84 percent – said they are looking for the “next silver bullet,” meaning a market-defining innovation rather than incremental iterations of the same products.

Creating new products is a priority for almost half (47 percent) of respondents, an increase of 20 percentage points from three years ago.

Accenture believes the building blocks of successful innovation are being put into place, few have assembled those fundamental elements in a way that drives the changes needed to generate the investment returns. I would really disagree with this with what they are indicating as the “sins of slippage” reported.

Accenture conclude “companies are embracing innovation as a tool to drive their business forward” but “they need to learn how to flex their innovation muscles with new thinking, new collaborations and new approaches to execution.”

They also are suggesting that it seems organizations have not yet learned clearly enough on how they innovate and can’t distinguish beyond achieving incremental performance gains and this executive desire wishing for transformational change. It still seems hugely at odds with their actual record (of performance) and the realities, shown in their responses to this survey and their belief and assertions of having innovation prowess and dominance. There is a significant mismatch occurring. This needs a far greater “call out” to recognize this set of inherent weaknesses.

Companies are seemingly playing this innovation game of ‘snakes and ladders’, rolling the dice expecting the “silver bullet” to power them up the winning ladder but then finding themselves suddenly landing on the snake (of reality) to slip back down. Innovation seems to still be left to chance, just like my game suggested and that is a risky game.

There are more snakes than ladders in the new board game of innovation

It is about time this “board game” of innovation snakes and ladders is put away and recognizes we are far more playing the “game of thrones” where the struggle is constantly evolving Kings and queens, knights and renegades, liars, lords and honest men…we are in a disruptive world where we are all wanting to play the ‘Game of Thrones.’

This game of thrones includes start-ups, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, competitors unheard of previously as suddenly arriving, emerging entities from ‘distant’ lands and those who see as adjacent or making new combinations powered by collaboration and new technologies, all wanting to surround and dethrone the incumbent. This is today’s reality.

Listening to the messenger we might be mistaking our real position

I disagree with Accenture that “embracing innovation as a tool,” it needs to be a real core, not simply a tool ,within our companies; better funded, understood and defended, it should not slip back as it seems to have done, indicated by the results from this survey.

Equally I feel in the results that companies are not on the right path unless we enjoy the game of constantly slipping back is not how I would be reading these results, yet Accenture are suggesting this.

I do think they (Accenture) have some of their conclusions wrong and are not delivering the serious messages this survey is bringing out in a way they should. Innovation is not a game to be left to chance, the roll of the dice or the ‘quiet’ acceptance of playing seemingly ‘snakes and ladders’ with it.

Having “building blocks being put into place” after years of talking about innovation is a real concern. I would have thought companies should be far more ahead than this. If the survey results are indicating such deterioration’s in some of the most critical aspects I feel the report seems more advocating a “quiet acceptance” whereas the results are a disaster.

I can’t understand the approach here. I would argue Big Corporate America is deluding itself on its innovation prowess it has serious issues to address if it truly believes growth will come from innovation if it is accepting this deteriorating outcome. It is the consultants role, from its data, to paint the ‘realities’ of this in starker ways. I would.

Accenture might have reported this outcome differently than it chose too. I think they missed the opportunity to deliver a darker warning here. Perhaps they felt not equipped to deliver this starker message but I believe they should have, the deterioration is worrying.

The world is not waiting for those steadily putting in place their building blocks

In my take on the world today, the reality is, we are all facing an increasing world of disruption and simply believing in finding (by chance) or just looking for that ‘silver bullet’ is not a winning position, it is a gambling one. Have our larger companies taken up the role of a gambler, enjoying the thrill of simply rolling the dice but more than likely not have more than ‘equal chance’ of winning the game. Are they feeling beaten already? It increasingly seems so. Innovation is an imperative we can’t afford to let slip back.

Having a good, clear focus on innovation, its value, contribution and the commitment it needs helps stack the winning odds in your favor or at least, equips you to fight in a really changing, challenging world we are presently in.

The real warning signs big US business is in deep serious innovation trouble

It does still seem that many US executives are deluding themselves on their innovation competences. Their mistaken beliefs and lack of real understanding of the complexities within good innovation management should not left to the ebbs and flows of chance, whim or short-term thinking. The need is by seriously putting into place a dedicated structure, well resourced and competent team,  built from a comprehensive understanding of innovation and its management. That requires a deeper thinking than most are prepared to do.

If executives continue to accept not to learn from past mistakes, constantly miss opportunities to exploit, big ideas are going nowhere and remain risk adverse, yet they keep looking for the ‘silver bullet’ as their solution, they are in deep trouble.

Watch out others are playing a different game

It is far more likely to come far too late for many incumbents as others, schooled in lean and agile thinking, searching for unmet needs or under-served opportunities will have disrupted them, well before this as they are constantly learning from their mistakes, consistently experimenting, exploring and exploiting opportunities by pivoting constantly, in the pursue of big ideas and embracing risk. That is a bedrock of much of the thinking that goes into innovation, market development, change exploration and growth generation

I would be very troubled to read this Accenture report if I was Corporate America.

The tone of US companies being on the right pathway, suggested by the authors, doesn’t help when you have such big boulders causing giant gaps in this innovation journey. It does seem the need to find a new pathway of innovation needs urgently finding.

We can’t afford to play this game of ‘snakes and ladders’ with innovation anymore and this survey should be a real wake up call to all those living in their ‘corporate’ ivory towers the real world is ‘eating you for breakfast, lunch and dinner’, the attacks on your established positions are constant, global and relentless. If you don’t feel surrounded, you soon will be.

This is the right time to wake up to the realities and reading a report / survey as seemingly benign but potentially lethal as this one from Accenture, one that on first read it might seem, is ‘clothed’ in reassuring tones,  yet it does seem to have some very worrying messages within it, believe me.

I would be very worried within the large US companies equally if they just take the suggested medicine offered here in this survey , they need to really forge a new more radical innovation pathway but will they simply keep playing the innovation snakes and ladders they seem to be doing?

The post Are we playing snakes and ladders with innovation? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I often wonder if “best practice” is actually a hidden drug within our organizations that everyone simply craves to be taking.

Firstly organizations need to move well beyond their lazy reliance on best practice comparison and they need to find better ways to explore emerging practices. But that takes many into the realm of increasing uncertainties, and most people and organizations are not trained for this exploration and experimentation, yet it is the place for gaining leading practice.

The Cynefin framework has five major domains

For a more distinctive innovation, you tend to move more towards the complicated domain, where experts ‘kick-in’ to help and offer plausible outcomes based on known experiences. You need to listen to conflicting advice and watch out for entrenched thinking so it can be challenged.

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The post Are you dependent on other’s best practices? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.