Firstly a narrative should be open-ended, there is no finite resolution yet to innovation understanding and secondly, it is for the intended audience to determine and relate, not the person presenting the narrative. For me, one light bulb went on.

The second light bulb moment came earlier this week. I was reading an article by Josh Bersin, called “the disruption of digital learning: ten things we have learned”. Josh is the founder of Bersin by Deloitte and this article was on one of his LinkedIn Pulse views. It actually stopped me in my tracks, it made me really think and recognize some of my recent shifts in my innovation focus was making real sense. The article alarmed me but it also ‘re-armed’ me.

Let me pull out a few ‘nuggets’ from this article by Josh Bersin, it has profound implications for all of us and how it triggered some questions for me. Perhaps the article will for you.

“Digital Learning does not mean learning on your phone, it means “bringing learning to where employees are.” It is a “way of learning” not a “type of learning.” It is more employee-centric in its design and needs to follow a employee’s journey at work.

My 1^st Question from this : How can I apply this way of learning to my innovation advisory work?

“As content grows in volume, it is falling into two categories: micro-learning and macro-learning”

One is what I call “micro-learning,” things we can quickly read, view, or consume and they only take 10 minutes or less

Macro-learning, on the other hand, is something we do when we want to truly learn a whole new domain.

To quote from the article: “Early in a role, we need “macro learning” to get started: understanding the job, the domain, the people, the systems. As we progress up the learning curve, we need continuous injections of new skills, information and connections, to proceed – until we become an expert”

“Then we tend to become the “coach” and we teach others, moving in a more horizontal way, until we reach the next level of proficiency, role, or promotion to energize our career. At that point we may need another “macro learning” intervention to go back up the learning curve, or if we fail we may actually get bored and leave”.

My 2^nd question: Am I designing what I convey to fit these two types of digital learning of micro and macro learning to help in these pathways of learning?

“Work Has Changed, Driving the Need for Continuous Learning, quite simply because the way we work has radically changed”.

In Deloittes research it has shown that in a given week, employees take less than 25 minutes of time to actually slow down and learn. Really? Wow!

My 3^rd Question: So how can I make my work relevant and fit innovation learning within this incredibly short time to learn?

“Research is also telling us we don’t learn well through “binge education” like a course. We learn by being exposed to new skills and ideas over time, with spacing and questioning in between”.

It is when we repeat information well, with timed intervals between, and we ask people questions (to force our brains to “retrieve” information), we actually create new learning pathways, just the same way we learn certain “on the job skills” through practice, repetition, and continuous questioning about why something didn’t work. We are entering the age of “spaced learning”: Repetition, Spacing, Questioning.

“Today learning is about “flow” not “instruction,” and helping bring learning to people throughout their digital experience”

My 4^th Question: What can I offer and how can I build this “flow” of learning?

It seems to me the need is to build personal learning pathways that build your narrative that is built on key topic training that can be specific to your “moment of innovating need” (micro-learning) or build an understanding of a whole “new domains of innovation knowledge” (macro-learning), so by combining these we can build a perpetual learning. One I can contribute into, that draws from my extensive resource repository built up over the last sixteen years of practice, research and knowledge building.

My 5^th question is to you, reading this: Do you have an innovation need? Can I help?

One clear message from this article by Josh was “We believe there are “Four E’s of learning” at work (education, experience, environment, and exposure). People at work must have time to learn, they must feel their new skills will be valued, we must take time for discussion and reflection, and managers must give people space and freedom to discuss mistakes, ask questions, and often experiment with new ideas”.

We do need to engage far more on innovation. It is the exchanges, the sharing and relating we build our knowledge and competencies. We can’t simply rely on stumbling across these or just have to find your own “type of learning,” we need outside stimulus and some structure in our “way of learning”.

Yet what is most troubling is today, we seem not to have any decent time to stop and learn. How do you respond to this time-starving for learning? I need my third light-bulb moment – any suggestions for my own ongoing pathway of learning?

My innovating regards

Paul Hobcraft

The post A light-bulb moment in Innovation Learning first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

To achieve a faster response we certainly need to educate the organization more than ever.
We need to absorb more, we need to encourage learning more especially to pursue innovation.

We need to actively set up learning ways within our organizations to establish their abilities to recognize the value of new, external information (knowledge), assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends.

Innovation within the organization needs not just greater recognition of its vital parts, but also of its status as a value-enhancing and organizational life-changing event that we need to move towards increasingly in more organized ways.

Innovation needs to be recognized as a clear discipline, new expertise that is as powerful as Marketing became some decades ago.
Seeking out knowledge that feeds our innovations
The more we embrace change and recognize innovation demands more of our time, the more we seek out knowledge that ‘feeds’ innovation.

The more we ‘push’ for learning, the greater chance we have of thriving in a challenging world.

The expectation ‘bar’ needs to be raised from those practising innovation, I feel the constant need is for those working within innovation they have this real need to raise their game significantly. Innovation needs organizing but it also needs a better understanding of its contributing parts.

Learning and Education should always start at home.

The earlier we learn, have open interactions and form linkages, the more we will be ready to advance innovation into what it must become: a discipline highly valued for what it contributes with in terms of wealth and growth potential.

We need to find the determination to underpin the capacity for innovation, lying within us all, and that comes from knowledge and education through collaborative learning. So what is your capacity for innovation really like within your organization?

Is the learning required for innovation set up in structured ways or left to individual learning and experimentation?

Do either structured or informal ways feed back into the organizational learning system to benefit others? Or is the knowledge gained just left ‘resident’ in the person, not being put to that greater use?

Knowledge exchange is the way forward but we need to avoid the easy paths.
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.

It is easy to copy but we often fail to recognize all the contextual factors that went into making it that one specific organizations good practice, and I guarantee these are not yours!

Best practice has their comparable uses but it is your focusing on the good and emerging practices within your own organization is the area to focus, for learning and wanting to improve into those that make your practices really work. Then applying, experimenting and learning from novel practices that provide growing confidence in creative thinking.

Also give some thought for next practice, those practices that prompt reinvention. They start such totally fresh thinking, they challenge existing paradigms and move you towards considering new business models.

Organizations constantly anticipate risk by reducing all the variables within risk and play safe with just being incremental. Is that wrong? No, as long as we have our reward systems geared to short-term performance, while we measure leadership success the way we presently do, and the shareholder just expects consistent dividends as their part of the equation and is quickly mobilized to force change if it does not meet this immediate aim, we head down the wrong path.

We are not sustaining our organization and we are not advancing ourselves either, we are destroying much in our current approaches. We do need to focus more on the competence-enhancing not competence-destroying aspects.

We need to re-balance the “risk and opportunity” to push our use of new knowledge into fresh innovation that ‘advances’ on the existing.

To recognize the difference we need to encourage knowledge to be ‘freely’ exchanged, and then provide the environment to encourage a re-educating on ‘seeing and exploring’ new possibilities that allow us to grow.

Shifting the knowledge needle takes real commitment

Can we recognize that choosing the tougher pathway of building our own distinct capabilities, learning block by learning block, is the right one to follow.

This allows us to build capacities that are ours, seeking out the knowledge to build the absorptive capacity that acquires, assimilates, transforms and exploits, so as to give us greater chances of finding new innovation that is valued and allows us all to grow and gain from this dedicated learning.

I can’t change our prevailing system but I can point to alternatives and suggest we have other options, ones pursued by the few, which are more visionary and brave and often disrupt the accepted.

These are building on novel and unique practices, extracted not from others’ best practices but from emerging practices learn by deliberate design and our own personal experiences, formed within our organization’s unique view of the take on their place in the world.

Finding our own way relies mostly on us to find the answers. We grow by seeking out knowledge as it feeds our minds to find unique ways to contribute and share.

The post Learning favours the brave who respond faster first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

For me innovation capabilities and competencies needs to be far more adaptive and aligned to the different emerging skills we should be bringing to bear, so we are able to find better innovating solutions for our collective futures.

The issue is this: if we do want to reshape much of what we are struggling with today – poor growth, diminishing futures, disconnected communities, stagnating economies or ones struggling to emerge from devastated and austerity measures inflicted upon them.

We do need to change our skill sets to reflect a more realistic and up to date need to navigate and transform knowledge to tackle these. Often our present skills are not equipped to manage in these more “disruptive” environments.

I wrote in a past post about “Learning to absorb new Knowledge for Innovation and the ability to understand Absorptive Capacity and how it works. Recently I followed that up with two recent posts about our pressing need that Jobs can be created but our skills do need very much adapting and refining, from where we are at present. One post was “Innovation Job Chasing- A Race Needed to Win” and the other was its precursor “The Present Innovation Jobless Era We Face.”

Our real need is to put in place those stronger adaptive skills  as our foundations so we can be better equipped to compete in the growing innovation race we all facing at personal, community and national levels. We need to equipped differently to meet the tougher global conditions that will be with us for our lifetimes, irrespective of our present age.

Competition won’t go away; it will only increase in its intensity.  To meet this we need to be far better equipped to be ‘innovation-ready’ in our skills. What forms a better ‘innovation ready’ skill set?

So what are those future skills we should be working towards to group around?

There was a report published in 2011 by the Institute for the Future (IFTF) and sponsored by the University Of Phoenix Research Institute to understand the skills workers will need over the next decade in our changing world, based far more on technology and its continued advance.

The report “Future Work Skills 2020” looks initially at what it feels are the six drivers that are shaping our landscape and then the ten skills they see as emerging that need to be where we place our future focus upon. These are:

• Sense-making: the ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed
• Social intelligence: ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions
• Novel & adaptive thinking: proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based
• Cross -cultural competency: ability to operate in different cultural settings
• Computational thinking: ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning
• New-media literacy: ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication
• Transdisciplinarity : literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines
• Design mindset:  the ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes.
• Cognitive load management: ability to discriminate and filter information for importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques
• Virtual collaboration: ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team.

A call to action

As the report authors of Anna Davies, Devin Fidler, and Marina Gorbis suggest, the results have clear implications for individuals needing to learn these skills. They will be asking from where will these come? From the educational institutions that need to grapple with changes that are occurring fast. Also it is the actions both  in business and at government level on how they will encourage and develop the strategies and policies fast enough, so as to offer the incentives to drive the changes needed. It is how quickly we move towards any organized ‘grouped’ learning of new skills can we begin to build within these new groupings.

All institutions certainly do need to provide the leadership to embrace the shifts needed in a constantly changing set of lifelong learning. It is recognized increasingly that skill renewal is constant to meet tomorrow’s ever changing global challenges.  A place where skills are far more heavily reliant on technology and we are able to manage these constant changes effectively. So as the knowledge that is emerging gets translated into new values offering new opportunity, learning and growth. We discover, absorb and translate.

Teaching both hard and soft skills that reflect tomorrows needs

The underlying need is to teach skills that promote quickly in response to changing conditions that will include a higher emphasis on critical thinking, depth of insight and the analysis capabilities to ‘translate’ the information or data emerging from multiple sources.

Equally the soft skills, so often ignored as crucial become increasingly relevant. The ability to collaborate and network, to read social cues, not ignore them as not important to me and respond with this much higher level of adaptability. I wrote about “Recognition of better soft skill taxonomy for Innovation some time back that has a useful way of grouping soft skills.

My summary

Predictions can always be difficult but the impression I gained from looking at the suggested ten future skills suggested by IFTF is that they do seem to make for a solid basis for us to gather around.

What of course we need to do is to develop what ‘lies underneath these ten skills ‘to allow us all to become more ‘innovation ready’ in our skills needed to survive. These might give us that better chance to thrive in the future and find fresh innovating opportunities because we are better equipped in relevant skills.

The burning issue is that our window of time to change and incorporate these into our organized learning is shrinking at ever faster rates. We need to move from recognition of these skills into the setting about of building them far more systematically.

We need to build our future innovation capacities on more relevant skills that are based more on what we need to have within our ‘natural’ skill base based on today at least, and not ones still based on 20th century practices.

The post Navigating the future landscape by developing adaptive innovation skills first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Increasingly we are looking outside for new knowledge that needs internally managing.

As organizations seek increasingly outside their own walls, the appreciation of how they are managing knowledge, learning and interpreting this is becoming a critical aspect of open innovation to be successful.

There is a growing need to absorb, integrate and apply this in new and novel ways for accelerating innovation performance.

The more we seek, the more the knowledge increases in complexity as markets are rapidly changing. The more we are relying on knowledge flowing into the organization the more we have to strengthen our inter-dependence and collaboration efforts to extract the knowledge we are acquiring for it potential value.

Are organizations recognizing the value of structuring their knowledge flows? Do they have the right learning mechanisms to accelerate and exploit new potentials from this knowledge?

Organizations tend to be set up for incremental learning.

Often the markets we operate within are volatile and suddenly change. Our capacity to change is often governed by the new knowledge we are provided. To make a change beyond incremental learning we need a different path of learning, we need often new capabilities to learn.

We all tend to place what is being said to us as highly situational and we often interpretive it in the way that we know, we reject alternatives to see things differently and as such we do not spot the innovation opportunity that was actually in front of us.

We look for what we know. This is sometimes called being locked within your own ‘competency trap’. To move away from this risk we need stronger learning mechanisms, a change in the path of learning.

Understanding Absorptive Capacity and how it works

“Absorptive capacity” is a term introduced through some academic research by Cohen & Levinthal, back in 1990 to describe an organizations “ability to recognize the value of new, external information (knowledge), assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends”.

Since then there has been significant academic contributions for exploring and validating this, in order to improve innovation performance and competitive advantage yet it is still not well integrated into our innovation process.

What we do need is to improve our HR management systems to build a more efficient transfer of knowledge throughout the organization to leverage it.

This is part of applying the principles of absorptive capacity as we increasingly use more networks, and external partners and collaborate with others we are accessing wider skills, inputs and competencies and we need to learn what this provides to aid the innovation process.

The theory goes that the more we understand, the more the innovative behaviour and capability go up in potential, and then the more we have richer innovation choices.

The Model of Absorptive Capacity explores potential and realized knowledge.

The need for a distributed organization innovation knowledge system

In some studies by Van den Bosch et all (2003) they suggested the need for three combined capabilities to manage and absorb the flow of knowledge coming into the organization

1. System capabilities that are used to integrate explicit knowledge
2. Co-ordination capabilities that build upon teams that establish the routines for structuring communications
3. Socialization capabilities that begin to share a ‘certain’ ideology, understand the potential of new paradigms and work towards interpretation tacit information for the good of the community.

When organizations are acquiring new insights, new knowledge that is not as closely related to their existing knowledge base there needs to be a very active set of efforts to manage this new incoming flow so as to extract all its potential value, absorb it and disseminate it across the relevant parties within the organization.

Having the three capability parts structured clear helps establish different areas of capability focus and embed it more fully.

Can you imagine the need for rapid learning of leading-edge knowledge that is required to be absorbed within the company, these require dedicated structured learning, and these cannot be left to individuals or ad hoc measures.

When you are learning anew you are searching for cognitive structure, managing implicit, often un-codified knowledge (tacit) that is difficult to transfer and also increased complexity, where you need to absorb a greater range of ‘components’ and apply new‘ architectural’ knowledge.

The difficulties multiply if you do not recognize the needs to structure knowledge but to explore it in more open unbiased ways.

The ability to use external knowledge has three sequential processes.

A)     Exploratory Learning– recognizing and understanding the potential value of the new knowledge that lies outside the organization

B)      Transformative learning– dispersing and assimilating the valuable new knowledge

C)      Exploitative learning– using the assimilated knowledge to create something different in knowledge or product and seeking to exploit this in commercial ways.

The more open Absorptive Capacity Process leads to understanding and outcomes

The call for managing the effective use of knowledge

One of the central drivers of the competitiveness of organizations is the effective use of knowledge. It is the generation, acquisition, integration and application of (new) knowledge that need managers manage to learn.

Knowledge underpins innovation, the more it changes, the more it becomes complex to discover, and the more we have of this real need to upgrade how we experience, experiment and absorb learning.

This needs structuring. As we absorb more external knowledge from our collaborators the need is to organise this well. Absorptive capacity needs to go beyond good theories into the increased application.

Absorptive capacity is an integral part of an organization’s innovation capabilities and its healthy development is a real significant dimension of innovation management that we all need to consider well.

The post Learning to absorb new knowledge for innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.