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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is where cascading helps with alignment- consider a model

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

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

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

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

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

Choice-cascade needs structure and operating principles

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

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

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

A cascade must move in both directions

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

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

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

How can innovation get squared away with strategy?

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

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

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

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

Contact me if you would like to learn more.

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The post Innovation has a hard job to align first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frustrations abound up and down the Organization.

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

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

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

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

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

Taking action in designing your innovation alignment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Innovation needs alignment- Resources to refer too.

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

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

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

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

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The post The Essential Connection Between Strategy and Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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

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

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

We are in need of fresh growth through innovation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Working the litmus test

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

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

Adopting the litmus test for delivering sustaining innovation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today uncertainly asks for a different performance

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

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

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

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

Managing innovation well is this middle way.

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

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

We need to cascade innovation down the organization.

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

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

Triggering the cascade-effect is seeking out broad adoption.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We need to deploy the cascading effect on innovation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Influencing the dynamics within the innovation system

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have the need to cascade innovation from the top down

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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