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

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

I would argue there is the real, urgent need is to make the innovation capabilities and capacities as distinctive and unique as the circumstances ‘we’ are facing today and in the future but also highly adaptive and flexible, so you can be ready to call upon each of the components when needed, in new combinations that deliver on the result.

We spend far too much time copying others and not deliberately setting about building our own ‘distinct’ capabilities and capacities to innovate, building the necessary building blocks through our own learning experiences. These are always shaped by the context and content of your innovation, the organization’s position, its resources, commitment and leadership appetite for innovation. Each of our choices takes up on our own evolutionary paths, we can never truly understand other ones because we never really  “walk in someone else’s shoes” Copying only renders us the same, not a great ‘winning position in highly competitive market conditions, is it?

Can we find you a unique set of critical innovation capabilities?

I believe we can as I outlined here on discussing dynamic capabilities. Here I am exploring solutions along an evolutionary path, that search for the unique innovation dynamics that are needed so you will arrive at the distinct and adaptive ones to what the CEO and board want to achieve out their strategic goals from its innovation investments. You take a fairly structured approach. It is knowing the capabilities that matter most to their particular innovation strategy and the present organization’s innovation fitness to lay out the pathway to learning how to improve, focus and execute these distinct capabilities needed in a highly focused manner and move progressively towards them.

As I have explained recently I often break my explanations down on this building core competency into eight parts.

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

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

The innovation accelerators model – I often keep coming back to this

I have been working on arguing you can have a unique model for some time. I think the way I have it structured is it is a formula for an innovation acceleration model. I’ve outlined this solution in a previous post. I think it is worth working through, it seems to move with the times of what we need to focus upon. Building an innovation framework that has real capabilities at its heart.

I have worked on a formula SCA = II + OC + EE + MLC + RNE for this.

Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA) comes from the combining effects of the following:

• II Innovation Intensity– its degree of adoption, the investments made, the multiple levels of activities and the focus of the intensity given to building capabilities to innovate.
• EE Entrepreneurial Energies– this os more on how you set about, promote and generate the internal environment as entrepreneurial to enable innovation in all its different forms to take hold and be seen as a learning environment people want to get involved with as they can readily identify with.
• MLC Market Learning Competence– these give a clearer awareness on what and where to acquire from and then take the market lessons from. The key need is to orientate always towards, and generally get to the heart of, where innovation takes place- in the marketplace and with your customers, knowing their real needs and also figuring out their unmet ones also!
• OC Organizational Learning– knowing the differences in the different ways of learning by linking the different intellectual capitals and combining the complementary assets needed to make them more dynamic.
• RNE- Relationship & Networking Effects– the supporting and enhancing aspects of making greater connections, collaborations and exchanges so as to speed up the process of innovation, reduce or contain costs and enhance your understanding through these external relationships and getting closer to knowing where latent knowledge lies, to assist and share this internally for greater impact and result for all.

I would encourage you to explore it, work it around in your own situation, it can provide a powerful catalyst to get everyone working at the critical parts of the formula and it is easy to remember.

So my additional ‘peeled onion’ to add to the stock of capability building for innovation is here

We do have to adapt out capability building increasing towards the future. We need to continue to differentiate ourselves and I would offer seven ‘generic’ thoughts or broad theme clusters that you might want to build around, to build your capabilities that will make you far more ‘innovation fit’ for the future.

1. Linking to a clear sense of purpose. If we are aware of the direction we can ‘open up’ the discussions about our needs to achieve this sense of purpose. A clarity of what ‘we’ have along with the gaps we need to bridge to get to this future purpose. This was my own attempt some time back to get at my own “Finding our true purpose”
2. Translating knowledge into value. Are we allowing knowledge to be gathered, understood, applied and diffused with our organization’s in thoughtful, well-structured ways. We need to learn how to amplify the signals in why this resonates and then we need to share these. I can never get away from the Absorptive Capacity needed to have in place and to ‘allow’ this knowledge to flow across the organization.
3. Achieving impact and intensity. We do have to strength our resolve to perform. Innovation work needs to arrive at distinct outcomes that offer impact and intensity. This conveys’ change, it challenges the existing by delivering something better.
4. Building the capacity to perform. How we assess and improve needs to be ongoing. We need to articulate the values and core needs within the organization, we need to set aside learning and exploring time and we have to show the commitments to sustaining this building ethic. We need constant walkabouts for testing and learning. The future depends on it, as we are in far more in fluid and adaptive situations that the past where agility, creativity, and ingenuity are all required.
5. Aligning People, Technology, and Innovation. Technology is dominating much of what we do and how and what we do it upon. We are having higher degree’s of connectivity, interactivity and sharing opportunities than in the past to be engaged in networks, ecosystems and different relationship forums than ever before. We need to harness the essential interplays this requires.
6. Exploiting and Exploring. The realization that we need to operate in ‘dual minds’ and structures is at last beginning to be recognized as essential to master. We need to be constantly striving for the innovation balance: between exploring and exploiting. We need to tackle innovation in tow different thinking hats These are about learning, searching and delivering the winning value of ‘new generation activity’ by recognizing how we balance out exploitation (extending the life) and exploration (new understanding). These need separation and different approaches.
7. Creating Sustaining Value. So many organizations require re-energizing, of being re-equipped for the future in different skills and behaviors. There are so many spaces to connect into and explore and this will come from the asset orchestration that you provide (structuring, building and leveraging).

We need to not just know the appropriate resources; we need to work on the skills, processes, routines, organizational structure and disciplines that enable firms to build, employ and orchestrate mostly our intangible assets relevant to satisfying customer needs and which cannot be replicated by competitors.

Assets that deliver the new innovation needed, through attracting in collaboration efforts and integrating these into you own evolving resources by turning them into being far more dynamic and evolving in nature to met the future challenges.

Under these seven broad ‘capability building’ approaches we can build your future innovation into being ‘sustaining’. We need to distinguish ourselves from others, as we equally have to compete with them. If we do believe we have the unique potential both in our people and in the opportunities out there, then you have to be highly purposeful in your committed intent to build the capabilities, capacity, and competencies on a very consistent basis that offer that uniqueness.

If we do believe we have the unique potential both in our people and in the opportunities out there, then you have to be highly purposeful in your committed intent to build the capabilities, capacity, and competencies on a very consistent basis that offer that uniqueness.

How you set about this building I have, within this post, suggested a number of ways to ‘peel the innovation onion’ and can only state my willingness to engage with you individually in this. This is of course if you believe innovation is essential to your future, as I certainly convinced it is increasingly becoming mission-critical to master, which is my starting point always for building the capacities to innovate.

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The post Building Differentiating Capabilities for Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In summary.

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

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

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

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

The resources provide the lungs that give oxygen; they need to constantly be nurtured, too breathe and pump new life into the existing.

For innovation the same applies, we need to consistently build our innovative resources, they give delivery of the healthy living cells to promote and sustain us in new value potential.

The problem is we often are not very good at maintaining our resources and innovation activity. We just simply do not sustain our efforts, we tend to allow them to drift along or become lopsided from one individual team’s efforts, while the others simply ‘wallow’
Equally, organizations rarely set about designing the right conditions, working towards the innovation environment that ‘delivers’ a particular state of being, so as to allow something positive to happen, it is just expected to happen. Do we even bother to check for the real pulse of our innovation efforts?

My belief is if we do not have a constant working and reworking of these conditions we can’t honestly expect our organization to build the capacity, capability and competency we need for innovation to take hold, embed and becomes the long-term driver of the growth our organizations need and desire. We need to design a more sustaining effort

How do you develop the capacity to be exceptionally good every day? It is this constant focus on building the capabilities that matter, yet often we are not aware of those that significantly contribute, against those that are necessary to have or simply those that we need around to maintain what we have achieved.

Combining capability with capacity and competence becomes essential.

It is the combination effect of skills, organization abilities, processes and learning that combines to get things done. They individually and collectively impact performance.

Are organizations clear on what makes-up their core competencies? Do they constantly evaluate these within a consistent evolving set of changing market conditions or are they rather static, inwardly driven and not outwardly aware?

I have been working on for some time –actually it seems for ever- on a framework that separates the static needs of working innovation with the more dynamic ones that make the difference and provide the abilities to turn every-day activity into more distinctive, breakthrough, radical or disruptive innovation outcomes.

This work-in-progress I keep building upon,can be explored on a dedicated web site of www.innovationfitnessdynamics.com.

We do need to plan a capability maturing pathway so as to move our capabilities and competencies through from often a current ad-hoc state.

We need to turn these into a more formalized and predictive, planned out state, which brings a more integrated approach so as to extract any synergies but allows for a decent level of autonomy to grow individuals, yet build teams that constantly ‘form’ and reform to tackle the challenges the innovation opportunity presents to bring those to successful fruition in better ways.

Organizations seem not to learn from common mistakes
The amount of inconsistency in innovation (fits and starts) ,the turning off and on holds the building of our capabilities and competencies to innovate continuously back.

We do need to have a consistent, well-thought through plan for innovation development within organizations that is a resource development plan that has its distinct budgets, plans and dedicated group that is accountable to deliver on these plans, updated like all others within the normal planning cycles of the organization.

Innovation needs to be central within the new business core

When are we going to recognize that innovation should be a real core of our organization’s makeup? I wrote a three part series about “moving innovation into our core” (here, here and here)

I concluded with the emphasis on technology within all our organizations that we are in need of a radical newly designed Enterprise-wide innovation process. One that is embracing and adapting constantly to all we have been learning about how innovation works and what technology, digital, networks, relationships and social streaming brings that all need to be fully integrated within this redesign.

Innovation requires increasing agility, flexibility and allowing creativity to flourish on a constant, evolving basis. Today, innovation often stays outside the mainstream system and operational structures, often to it’s and the organizations detriment. as it is seen as something that does not fit the ‘norm’. This is today’s innovation problem

Innovation needs to be fluid, open, responsive; sometimes reliant on the instinct, hunch or powerful insight that is never ‘predictable’ but suddenly emerges from a collision of events, or random thoughts that lead to a new insight, a game changing one. It is really hard to turn this ‘randomness’ or serendipity into a system but certainly not impossible.

How are we going to design our innovation capabilities, competencies or capacity unless we fully recognize the dramatic changes in business that are now underway and what this needs to be addressed, to allow for a more responsive, fluid, agile and adaptive culture, to flourish and respond so as to generate the better innovation of the future we need.

Recognizing differences
There are real differences when it comes to building innovation understanding and equipping your organization to perform at improved levels. There are different traits, actions and activities to think through.

Here are some of the needs:

* We need to build far more serendipity into what we do, also random connections, as well as purposeful discovery, by seeking out increasing connections and engaging in networks of learning and mutual exchange.

Places where we are turning curiosity into reality and building our innovative mental abilities for growth, development and accomplishment, opening up and being receptive and then translating this into new innovation.

* We need to embed into our new innovation core new routines and thinking. It is determining the changes needed by those new combinations of fusion by seeking out the chemistry from all the connections and exchanges, pushing for creative collisions, positive tensions and dynamics to engage fully in innovation, so the culture, climate and environment are vibrant, challenging and exciting.

* We need to constantly seeking the new space from knowledge exploitation and exploration, redefining the organization edges, enlarging and enhancing our understanding, pushing constantly out, constantly evaluating, discovering and aligning growth options and then seeking out those outcomes that potentially offer the right return on innovation

* We need to place learning into the centre, to allow our capability building, new competencies to grow and evolve. We focus on the constant need to provide the mechanisms so as to improved performance and capacities by focusing on both our mental and physical abilities to our position and function to explore and exploit. Each contributes to our ability to receive, hold and absorb new knowledge. We measure these by the increased volume and quality outcomes

* We need new structures, attitudes, investment and motivation to change, to focus on innovation building that needs instilling and coming from the top, not just as a commitment that must happen but integrated and aligned into the strategic thinking and planning, worked through a clear pathway of change to achieve a different, core innovation capability..

* We need to determine the abilities to deliver in effective, focused, efficient and aligned ways. Knowing what is important, seeking out the actions to support and deliver the part needed to achieve the desired goals. Adjusting as we go, as we learn, ramping up what is working, dampening down what is clearly not.

* We need to build innovation by working it continuously,  on making our environment into this more evolving and dynamic one, where the climate and culture of innovation thrive and grows from this constant feeding and attention.

In summary
The more we focus specifically on what makes up our innovation competencies, capabilities and capacities, delivering the dynamic ones that give innovation impact,  the more we are able to comprehend what is important, produce added value and transform from what we have known into what we can see differently, opens us up more into the world of innovation possibilities..

It is developing the skill, knowledge and ability (or capability, capacity and competence) for innovation to deliver on its promise to sustain, grow and provide new value-adding outcomes that take the organization forward and it can no longer be haphazard but systematic and purposeful.

The post Delivering the innovation core: building capability, capacity and competency. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I’m undertaking a rather exciting approach to describing innovation, within a collaboration venture, that gets more exhilarating and inspiring as we explore, clarify and document. Regretfully I can’t share this here at present but I certainly will when it gets to that point of ‘release’.

Some of the different areas or themes I’ve been investigating have flowed from one set of enquiries that have taken me into another and then yet another.

These simply get my innovation juices flowing and really are allowing me to make so many new connections. Here is just a few of these in this last week that have emerged from some of my research that provide a host of thoughts:

Leaders & Laggards
In this group of investigations, I started in trying to gain a better perspective of the discussion of leaders and laggards and what differentiates them. Timely to these investigations has been some recent studies by Capgemini Consulting and IESE Business School with a recent leadership study “Managing Innovation: An Insider’s Perspective”
I’d suggest the slideshare presentation is well worth taking some time out to view and understand as it covers views from those leading and managing innovation in their organizations and how they think about the innovation function http://tinyurl.com/c9o7cuw

Then I have been reminded of the continued great work of Chris Zook and James Allen, both partners at the consulting firm, Bain & Company, in their article “The Great Repeatable Business Model” http://tinyurl.com/d483eqq
The message of differentiation and the level of focus on clear specific areas of innovation and its management makes a real difference for separating leaders and laggards.

Those that endure and adapt

In the article by Chris Zook and James Allen they speak of differentiation that tends to wear with age and often the real problem is internal. It is complexity and in this a complex organization forgets what it is good at, it proliferates, it losses key people, it moves away from its core business, it losses focus and it begins to have that ‘great disconnect’ between upper management and the front-line employees. It seems to me the organization just simply begins to break down and lags even more in performance and returns.

They go on and suggest a lack of consistency begins to kill the economies of scale and equally retards the organizations ability to learn that adds up to them struggling with increasing complexity and fading differentiation.

I was looking for some of the enduring points of what needs to be put into place. This was offered “When a company internalizes a set of principles, the message no longer gets garbled. A shared point of view, core beliefs, and a common vocabulary improve everyone’s ability to communicate and foster self-organization.”

They go on and suggest “this increases the speed of business, you capture more growth opportunities ahead of competitors and accomplish more per unit of time.”

I also liked one comment they made that “up and down the organization, information slows and grows distorted.” I would suggest without a clear knowledge capturing and dispersing structure for information this is not the only thing that gets distorted, often it is the real values of the innovation activities themselves.

Those products or concepts that emerge eventually as completely out of shape from what was intended initially, due to this complexity within the decision and approval process, become totally different before something eventually gets ‘out of the door’ in finished design. So much gets lost or ‘distorted’ along the way and the end result becomes far too compromised on the customer need it was intended to resolve.

Innovation effort may not be worth it

Equally I always enjoy the thinking of Vijay Govindarajan and in a recent article along with Manish Tangri entitled “Why that innovation effort may not be worth it” http://tinyurl.com/847ah4c they discuss two key factors of motivation and competence and how you can put your organization and its leaders to the test.

They ask two great questions “How hungry are you for innovation?” and “Is the initiative set up for success”. I did like the point made of “a leader provides direction under ambiguity” and how many of our leaders would be truly comfortable in doing this?

Looping back we need to ask  how far are you from your core?

We come back to increasing complexity, straying from our core, communicating mixed messages, showing a clear lack of decisiveness.  If your innovation message is not sharp and convincing up and down your organization, or even understood by your customers you eventually lose out, you become even more of a laggard and allow others to slip away into clear leaders.

Part of our need in organizations is to stop breaking down the parts, layering on that increased complexity. We should be designing the innovation framework and system to clarify and inspire more. We need to reinforce more on where the key differentiation points are. We need to be sharper in our understanding of true differentiation and stick to this.

The key here is the real need to simplify and focus down within organizations.  Also we need to seek consistency wherever we can, in communications, in our strategic intent and in our dialogues to clarify. We tend to do the opposite, we make it too complex and this is killing innovation, killing growth, killing organizations.

Above all we need to work up and down the organization with some clear, compelling messages that give clarity, allows for the necessary linkages and make sure the parts reinforce one another.

The last part of my walkabout in my research was “Creative Destruction”.

I recently wrote a blog “The Innovating Era: Creative Destruction or Destructive Creation?” http://tinyurl.com/dyy964s and in particular the destructive creation part and how this was destroying more than what was coming in its place.

I finished with this comment: “All I hope is it will let us make sure we put the emphasis back far more on the “creative” innovation part and not the ‘destructive’ nature we have moved towards recently”.

Chris Zook has just written on this “When Creative Destruction Destroys More than it Creates” in the last week in an HBR blog http://tinyurl.com/7pe8qvf and makes an important point (in my mind) that “the extinction of once-great innovators is less often caused by technological or market evolution, and more often by self-inflicted wounds and slow cycles of decision and adaptation.”

He brings us back to the point “it is internal complexity that turns companies into lumbering dinosaurs.” The suggestion is, if we can’t keep ourselves clear on simplicity and focus and really tackle complexity as this is the “silent killer of profitable growth,” and “the greatest inhibitor of adaptability”.

Leading the way does falls to leaders.

My last extraction was from another lead and laggard viewpoint:  “A leader doesn’t tell people what to do. A leader helps people understand what needs to be done and brings the people and resources together to make it happen”

We need to focus on our greatest strengths but to do this we do need to understand them. It seems to me, so many leaders surprisingly don’t have a clue on how and where innovation can contribute in lasting differentiation, where the growth should be coming from or how to galvanise the organization to be simply on the same page to make sure it can happen.

We need some consistency in how we set about innovation.  Sometimes what simply scares me is that this basic task is often missed off the leader’s agenda to actually make sure it is happening, often because they have not been fully involved or understood their role in this.

The post Making those increasing connections first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.