Exploring Dynamics Within Innovation Landscapes
How do we show the real difference that innovation can provide?
I believe we have eight needs to achieve.
Each of us will arrive at our own personal understanding of what this “all means”.
Innovation is about achieving difference so if we all arrived at the same point of understanding then we actually are defeating ourselves from the very beginning
So what are these eight ‘triggering’ points? Briefly:
How do we show the real difference that innovation can provide?
I believe we have eight needs to achieve.
Each of us will arrive at our own personal understanding of what this “all means”.
Innovation is about achieving difference so if we all arrived at the same point of understanding then we actually are defeating ourselves from the very beginning
So what are these eight ‘triggering’ points? Briefly:
Agility holds a special interest for me. I named my consulting business Agility Innovation Specialists and constantly am looking to emphasize that agility is really important to managing innovation.
I came across an article written a few years back by the Korn Ferry Institute and I thought it was worth extracting the top line thoughts as important in my advocacy of innovation.
If you want to read more from their report here is the link.
My takeaways from this:
I have been heavily influenced by the great work of John Hagel and Deloitte’s “Big Shift Index” as a frame to measure the forces of long-term change. What really holds my attention is “knowledge flows” and they are suggesting we are moving from a world of push to a world of pull.
The world is increasingly uncertain and to steer through this we need new ways to access, attract and accumulate understanding.
Knowledge is highly intangible. Today it is less to do with the “stocks” of knowledge we have the ability to keep refreshing and that means increased participation in the relevant “flows” of knowledge.
I would like to lay out some thoughts on why we should be considering a curation platform for innovation and the value it can bring to a broader innovation community.
These are some opening thoughts that I felt needed to just “hang out there” and see where they take me and clearly, you as a reader.
The issue I am reflecting upon is our growing concern that we all are living in a world heading towards digital overload, with the risk of it simply overwhelming us, perhaps we are becoming more isolated and detached within this.
We can’t simply rely on focusing around ‘all things’ digital, we need people to bring the insights and their experience together for the eventual innovation solutions. We need to provide a curators platform for innovation, to make all the essential connections.
Learning is changing, are we absorbing or just simply gathering?
What can we do to solve this? Perhaps to offer a service on building a specific content platform. In this case around innovation. It has to be built on a more fluid, responsive and constant flow of knowledge. It cannot be static it has to be highly dynamic, it needs to relate to each of us specifically but be broad enough to cater for the wider community within innovation looking for innovation knowledge and understanding.
Yet what are some of the principles we need?
Innovation can be fairly complex in what needs to be pulled together, as often it ‘flies’ in contradiction to the normal organizations ways and wishes to work in structured, efficient ways. Innovation can often be rather chaotic and discovery driven.
One of the useful ideas of using an external resource is to put additional coordinates into your innovation world, they see contradictions in a different way and can assist in working through the conflicting signals, so as to help align innovation in helpful and thoughtful ways. Certainly the innovators role is not an easy one inside the structured world of larger business entities.
I like practical advice with evidence, it helps bridge misunderstanding. This can come through a variety of methods: benchmarking, validating, frameworks and interpreting how innovation can fit with your current or future needs. Often the outside advice can place innovation into a greater context that can accelerate the outcomes you need to gain understanding and achieve increasing identification.
If you don’t have time, how can you learn? We are in need increasingly, of faster understanding, to quickly learn or resolve an immediate need, or we have this determination or essential requirement within our innovation role to deepen our knowledge and understanding of innovation. These are usually split into two parts, called are “micro or macro learning opportunities”.
The value of having an innovation guide, mentor or coach helps you accelerate through both these needs and learning opportunities. I see four points of value, my value proposition, if you like, for you to achieve personal innovation growth:
Formalizing a new Innovation learning-as-a-service is complicated, far more than I originally thought. Still, a certain course has been set and it is now working through much of its structure, learning much myself on the way to fit this within the innovation puzzle we all have.
When I was thinking through this concept I fell back into onto one of my most valuable techniques to work through, clustering a set of questions and capturing all the different thinking through the use of Mind Mapping techniques. Such a valuable tool.
A selection of maps that included: what a curator can do in innovation, of painting a picture of a strong advocacy practice, of working through a guiding approach, the need to reflect on the whole facilitation process, etc., and each brainstorm takes a time to work through, build and formalize. The end result becomes a much richer landscape of what I can offer and what equally might be needed.
My mind has been swirling around the significant changes taking place around learning. Not just in the time we have available, suggested recently as 25 minutes per week to stop and learn but in the variety of ways we can learn. Clearly, many of these are digital to construct, so as to apply the more modern design process that works for each of us individually, at our time of need.
I have been struck by the emphasis on personal learning and development. We still get very caught up in the need for scale yet it is the ability and flexibility to design these to our individual pathway that becomes “the order of the day”. The constant struggle is for each of us in simply stopping to focus, finding the time and the last thing you can afford to do, is take an ad-hoc approach to this, it needs a structured design.
This is where external facilitation might help